Aimed at sending a strong message to banks found involved in thousands of crores of fraud, the Finance Ministry is mulling over a proposal to reshuffle the top officials at large state-run banks such as Punjab National Bank and Bank of India and replace them by some of country’s biggest lender State Bank of India (SBI) top executives.
According to sources in the know, if the Government plan finally sees the light of the day, one of the three managing directors of the SBI could be asked to join Bank of India.
“There is a thinking to replace the top slots at large PSU banks with senior executives of the SBI, India’s largest commercial bank that is said to have a pool of talented officers, revealed the source.
As per the sources, Dinabandhu Mohapatra, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Bank of India, is tipped to join Allahabad Bank that is facing a crisis in the wake of the Nirav Modi-Mehul Choksi scam. As a subsequent fallout, it’s to be noted that the board of Allahabad Bank has divested CEO Usha Ananthasubramanian of executive powers after she was named in the CBI charge sheet on the unauthorised use of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) messaging system during her tenure at Punjab National Bank (PNB) that recently rocked the nation with details of Rs 13,000-crore fraud. The fraud, billed as the biggest in India’s banking history, pulled off by few rogue employees, found to have manipulated already laid out banking norms and procedures, resulted in biggest ever quarterly loss of Rs 13,417 crore for the January-March period 2018 for country’s second-biggest lender.
Bank of Baroda and Canara Bank are among the other lenders that may also see top SBI executives taking over the key positions.
The basic rationale of this exercise by the government is to drive home the point that the Government is serious about taking action against bankers where thousands of crores were lost in fraud, maintained the sources.
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