LAHORE: The deposits of Bank of Punjab (BoP) have soared Rs327.24 billion by September 2014 from Rs164.07 billion in December 2008 with a drastic cut in its cost from 10.89 percent in January 2009 to 6.85 percent in September 2014.
According to BoP President Naeemuddin Khan, the bank has come a long way from capital adequacy ratio of 3.87 percent in December 2009 to CAR of 10.01 percent in September 2014 with considerable rise in investments to Rs144.81 billion in September 2014 from a mere Rs25.67 billion in December 2008.
He claimed that the BoP had recovered Rs55 billion over the past six years, adding that non-performing loans (PLs) were still very high.
Mr Khan announced that from now onwards, the BoP would fulfill all future minimum capital requirements of the country through its own resources instead of issuing rights shares.
The BoP chief informed that now they could recommend to the board of directors in the next meeting to consider paying dividend to its share holders after a lapse of almost seven years. “Six years back chaos is all over due to extremely bad loaning done on political grounds” he said, adding that non performing loan portfolio of the bank swelled to Rs77.34 billion by end of December 2009. All loans he added were approved before the takeover of the new management.
Mr Khan said that the bank had got registered FIRs against the defaulters and sent cases to NAB for recovery of dead loans. He said the courts had granted stay on loans worth Rs40 billion, adding that efforts were being made to vacate these stay orders. “We have recently recovered Rs900 million from Harris Steel from Dubai and another Rs500 million has been recovered from the same party in December,” he added.
