Depositors staged a protest outside the Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative (PMC) Bank’s Poonam Nagar branch at Andheri (East) on Friday morning.
On September 23, 2019, the Reserve Bank of India had superseded the board of the multi-state urban cooperative bank and placed it under various regulatory restrictions after detection of certain financial irregularities.
Initially, the RBI had allowed depositors to withdraw Rs 1,000 which was later raised to Rs 1 lakh per account to mitigate their difficulties. In June this year, the RBI had extended the regulatory restrictions on the cooperative bank by another six months till December 22, 2020. PMC Bank depositors have spent the last one year holding protests, meeting politicians, writing to various authorities in an effort to get their hard-earned money back.
PMC Bank had hidden and misreported loans given to real estate developer HDIL. Its exposure to HDIL Group was over Rs 6,500 crore, nearly 73 per cent of its total loan book size of Rs 8,880 crore as of September 19, 2019. As on March 31, 2019, its deposit base was Rs 11,617.34 crore.
The misdoing at the bank was leaked by one of its board members to the RBI, forcing its former managing director, Joy Thomas, to confess to the regulator about misreporting of loans. Thomas along with the bank's former chairman Waryam Singh were arrested in October last year. The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Mumbai Police had later arrested few more officials of the bank in the fraud case.
(With inputs from PTI)
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