KATHMANDU, July 12: Banks and financial institutions (BFIs) have blacklisted more than 300 individuals and firms just in the past three weeks of the last month of the current fiscal year.
The rise in the number of defaulters has been recorded amid the business community requesting the government not to put them in the list of loan defaulters citing the lockdown which has been imposed since March 24. Although the government has eased the lockdown from June 11, most businesses have been struggling to gain momentum while many banks have repeatedly been asking their clients to pay the installments on time.
According to the Credit Information Bureau, a total of 12,160 individuals as of now have been registered in the defaulters’ list. The figure is around one percent of the 1.5 million borrowers who have received a total credit of Rs 3.2 trillion from BFIs. CIB’s records show that an additional 306 new names were added to the list during June 15-July 9.
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Meanwhile, the government is seeking to allow more agencies to work on credit information. A new bill in this regard was registered at parliament last week.
The new bill will facilitate the flow of information to more lending agencies, which need to know about the credit history of potential borrowers to assess their creditworthiness. The bill says that the CIB shall comply with the new arrangement within six months after this bill becomes a law. The bureau was established through a collaboration between the central bank and BFIs in 2004.
The bill has provisioned that in addition to BFIs other lending agencies such as cooperative banks and saving and credit cooperatives, the Employees Provident Fund, Citizen Investment Trust, Social Security Fund, Pension Fund, Youth and Small Entrepreneurs Self-Employment Fund, companies that provide services related to financial lease, companies that provide hire-purchase services and any other agency approved by the central bank can avail services from credit information agencies.
