Banks invest in car-jackers to recover loans

This week on 30 Minutes, CNN-IBN exposes the muscle men banks use to lift your car and arm-twist you into making that payment.

Goa: Jowett D’Souza, a resident of Colva in Goa, bought his dream car with an ICICI Bank loan in March 2002 and paid 26 installments of the loan on time. He missed just two installments, and paid for that.

Recovery agents, who were allegedly working for the bank, beat him up and took away his car on August 6, 2004. “They gave me two blows, they pushed me and grabbed the car keys from me," D’Souza alleges. Banks have a right to recover loans but there are strict guidelines on how to do that.

The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) guidelines say banks first have send notices to defaulters, then given them reasonable time to pay up and they are forbidden from using “muscle power” to recover loans.

The ICICI Bank chose to do otherwise, and Jowett says he has evidence to prove it. He filed a Right to Information application and got Police Control Room file notings, which allegedly show that the bank had sent recovery agents against him.

"I wrote a letter to the Director of Transport in October 2004 saying that the vehicle is in dispute between me and ICICI bank and cannot be sold, " says Jowett.

But the recovery agents got round this. They forged Jowett's signature March 31, 2005 and ended the hypothecation on the car. Someone posing as Jowett on April 4 filed a complaint at the Colva police station that the car papers, including the registration certificate, had been lost.

Then on April 5 the recovery agents forged another letter and posing as Jowett asked the Regional Transport Office (RTO) to withdraw the freeze on his car’s sale.

The police’s Crime Branch on May 21 surprisingly issued a no-objection certificate and permitted the car’s transfer. Jowett's signatures were forged on May 25 and on May 30 the RTO cleared the car’s transfer to Mallapuram in Kerala.

Jowett’s lawyer, Radha Rao Gracious, calls the recovery agents “gangsters”. “The banks nowadays seem to be engaging gangsters to seize cars from the defaulters and this is done by the banks in collusion with the police,” alleges Gracious.

The police filed a first information report (FIR) in August 2005 on Jowett’s complaint only after he went to court. And what have the police done since then? “We have registered a case here and the investigations are going on. Soon we are going to file a chargesheet,” says Shekhar Prabhudesai, Superintendent of Police, South Goa. Almost two years have gone by but not a single arrest has been made.

Pay up or get thrashed

Banks are required to go to courts if a customer defaults on loan repayment, but recovery agents can get their money back sooner. Johnny D’Cruz (name changed) is a former recovery agent and knows all the tricks of the trade.

D’Cruz says he had a gang of four men “who would do the needful” when banks asked them to recover loans. “Yes, we had to resort to violence at times. We would slap them (loan defaulters) or kick them. We had to use some violent means," he says.

D’Cruz alleges recovery gangs bribe the police, even their “head” brass, who then refuse to take complaints of loan defaulters.

That’s what happened to Jowett when he went to the police to complain against the recovery agents who had snatched his car. "The Sub-Inspector was reluctant to file my complaint," alleges Jowett.

CNN-IBN tried to catch Sub-Inspector Jivba Dalvi, who allegedly refused to take Jowett's complaint, on hidden camera while he was making a deal with undercover reporters on recovering a bad debt. Dalvi noticed the camera and panicked. "I just request you to keep me out of it . Please, dar lagta hai (I am scared)—you just see my purse," he pleaded with the reporters.

Dalvi allegedly owns a bungalow worth Rs 50 lakh though he joined the police just a few years back, and recovery agents says they can work freely because of officers like him.

As D’Cruz says: "We would inform the police that we are going to sieze a car and if we didn’t find the car we would seek their help to locate it.”

It’s for using muscle men like Johnny that a consumer court in Delhi has fined the ICICI Bank Rs 55 lakh. The bank denies using “coercive techniques” and says it has a code of conduct to recover loans.

“We will abide by whatever the court verdict is. There are certain discrepancies in what the agency has informed and what the customer has claimed and we will certainly look into those discrepancies. We would however add that in no point of time we would justify coercive techniques or violence in our recovery process. There is a laid down code of conduct which we follow and scrupulously adhere to,” says Charudutt Deshpande, Spokesperson for the ICICI Bank.

(For updates you can share with your friends, follow IBNLive on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest)

#icici #bank #goa #car #CNN-IBN Investigations