Mumbai: The restrictions imposed by Reserve Bank of India, on Punjab and Maharashtra Bank (PMC) Bank, has brought bad news for a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, who a week ago transferred a huge amount in this bank. Now he cannot encash the fixed deposits in the bank which are reserved for Diwali Bonus.
The PMC bank faced RBI action on Wednesday for hiding the non-performing assets, thereby leaving thousands of depositors stranded as they were initially allowed to withdraw only Rs 1000 and now will be allowed to withdraw Rs 10,000 in six months duration.
Ramesh Shendge, a former legislator and now a BJP leader recently invested a crore of rupees as fixed deposits in PMC Bank. "This money was to help me garner funds to give Diwali bonus to the 400 employees of my company. I am now stranded as I am unable to give them the assured bonus. This will be a black Diwali," Shendge told FPJ.
Sadly, the employees also have their salary accounts with this bank. Shendge has current account for his two companies, mainly MR Maritime and Ajay international.
"We deposit the salaries of our employee in this bank, every month. Moreover, just a week ago I invested one crore rupees as fixed deposits to give Diwali bonus to our employees. Earlier I had this money in another account of a nationalised bank. But the PMC bank officials persuaded me to close my old bank account and open a new FD in the PMC banks offering me one per cent interest rate more than that of a nationalised bank," said a shell shocked Shendge. He added, "Since we were doing transactions with this bank for a long time, I believed them. But I am in a shock since the time I learnt of the RBI restrictions on our Bank," he said.
When asked whether he ever got any alert about Bank's financial condition, he negated. "Usually, businessmen check the NPAs of a bank, but it was not more than 2 per cent, which is normal for any co-operative bank. The bank had good amount of deposits. In fact, banks with 25 per cent NPAs are doing good. We were not even aware that this bank had loaned Rs 2,500 crore to HDIL. Even I expressed my anguish to the bank officers after we learnt of it recently, who said even they were not aware of this issue. Moreover, many of the bank staff opened FDs in this bank," Shenge said.
Who is Shendge?
Ramesh Shendge is a prominent leader of Dhangar community. He was a Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) member of the Legislative Council from quota. He left NCP and joined BJP 5 years back. His father Shivajirao Shendge was minister between 1990-1995 in the then-Chief Minister Sharad Pawar's cabinet.
