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- By Parinda News Bureau, July 26, 2006, 12:50 IST
Days after the Delhi court reprimanded ICICI bank loan recovery officials using strong arm tactics for loan recovery, ABN Amro bank in Mumbai has made headlines for threatening to break the legs of a customer if he didn't pay back his loan.
With any ordinary citizen, this may have gone unnoticed and even unreported but this time the person they threatened was Uma Shankar, additional commissioner of customs, a senior central government official as per a report in DNA.
Uma Shankar was transferred to Mumbai from Nagpur. Within days of arriving in Nagpur, Uma Shankar received a call from ABN Amro bank recovery agents asking him to pay up some debts he can incurred in Nagpur itself.
Uma Shankar did not dispute the amount but requested them to wait for a couple of days, having justed shifted to Nagpur. The threats from ABN Amro bank recovery agents continued despite this request.
Uma Shankar was finally driven to file a complaint at the Bandra Kurla police station. The amount according to police sources was Rs 20,000. The police are shocked at the techniques employed by the ABN amro bank recovery agents.
“How can they threaten a senior central government employee who has the capacity to pay the amount with words like, ‘Paisa do nahin to taang tod denge (give us the money or we will break your legs)’.
If a senior official is treated like this, after assuring payment in a couple of days, imagine what happens to ordinary citizens,” asked Bipin Bihari, additional commissioner of police (west).
The recovery manager representing ABN Amro bank, Shankar Anand Yadav and Ganesh Kadam another employee of RMS, the recovery company retained by ABN Amro bank have been arrested and charged with Section 506, Part-II of the Indian Penal Code(IPC) for threat,” said Rolfy Pereira, senior police inspector, Bandra-Kurla Complex to DNA.
On Monday evening, A Sheikh, an official from ABN Amro Bank, said at Bihari’s office that the “bank has decided to stop using RMS as recovery agents.” The bank however will continue to use recovery agents for recovering loans from customers.
Additional commissioner, Bipin Bihari, however, wants the message to get through to the public that such harassment by recovery agents is not condoned by the law: “But I want the bank to declare it in media to help innocent customers who do not how to tackle such criminal behaviour by agents.”
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