SBI, UCO Bank looking for buyers to clear off Rs 12.45-billion NPAs

State owned lenders SBI and UCO Bank are looking for buyers to sell non-performing accounts (NPAs) worth Rs 12.45 billion and have invited bids from ARCs, banks, NBFCs and FIs to clean their books of such dud assets.

"In terms of bank's revised policy on sale of financial assets in line with the regulatory guidelines, we place Zenith Birla (India) Ltd and Sona Alloys Pvt Ltd for sale to ARCs/banks /NBFCs/FIs," SBI said in the bid document.

Sona Alloys has an outstanding of Rs 6.47 billion towards SBI, while Zenith Birla has Rs 1.39 billion.

It has asked the interested parties to place their expression on March 12 and the process of e-bidding will take place on March 23.

UCO Bank, based out of Kolkata, said it has identified about 13 NPA accounts with outstanding balance of Rs 4.57 billion and has invited expression of interest from asset reconstruction companies (ARCs), banks, financial institutions (FIs), non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) for the proposed sale of its NPAs by March 13.

Last week also, the country's largest lender SBI along with United Bank of India and long-term infrastructure lender IFCI have put up on sale a number of NPA accounts to recover Rs 163 billion loans given to various companies.

The gross non-performing assets (NPAs) of all the banks in the country amounted to Rs 8.41 trillion at end-December, bulk of which is in the books of public sector banks (PSBs).

Thus, the PSBs have in the recent past expedited their loan recovery process, specifically against those loans that have turned bad.

Several mechanisms like referring cases of NPA accounts to National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) to recover dues as well as selling bad loan accounts to asset reconstruction companies (ARCs)/banks/FIs/NBFCs.