Bank of Baroda starts 'aggressive action' to recover bad loans of large amount

State-owned lender Bank of Baroda has set up a team of lawyers, called the ‘War Room Team’, to deal with bad loans whose recovery is now embroiled in legal complications, reports The Economic Times.

BoB has 380 high-value bad loan accounts, in which the bank is either the sole lender or the consortium leader. The total outstanding amount of these loans is about Rs 15,000 crore.

The bank witnessed a net loss of Rs 3,102 crore in the January-March quarter of 2018. In the same period last year, it had made a net profit of Rs 154 crore.

Following this, the bank has taken up several “aggressive” actions for recovery to bring back the bank’s profit. “We have started directly monitoring the progress of enforcement action in those high-value accounts,” Venugopal Narayanan, head (legal), Bank of Baroda, told the publication.

The lender has also created a stressed asset management vertical, under which 15 existing stressed asset-recovery branches and another 32 newly-created regional stressed asset recovery branches are working.

The bank has arranged for special grooming of officers on various modes of recovery before they are posted to the stressed assets branches to yield better results.