New Delhi : Business tycoons Mehul Choksi, the Jhunjhunwala brothers, and Vijay Mallya are among the prominent individuals linked to companies named by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in a list of the top 50 wilful defaulters accused of scamming the country’s banks.
In a Right to Information or RTI response to activist Saket Gokhale released on Tuesday, the RBI said that outstanding loans amounting to Rs 68,607 crore taken out by the 50 firms have been written off till September 30, 2019.
A “write-off” is an accounting term used to denote assets whose value becomes zero. Written-off loans refer to debt that has been factored as a loss even though the lender may continue attempts to recover it.
Fugitive diamantine Mehul Choksi’s company Gitanjali Gems tops the list of these defaulters with Rs 5,492 crore. Choksi’s other firms Gili India and Nakshatra Brands also have loans of Rs 1,447 and Rs 1,109 crore respectively written off.
He is followed by REI Agro with Rs 4,314 crore and Winsome Diamonds with Rs 4,076 crore.
Rotomac Global Private Limited owes Rs 2,850 crore which have been written off followed by Kudos Chemie Ltd with Rs 2,326 crore, Ruchi Soya Industries Limited, now owned by Yoga guru Ramdev’s Patanjali, with Rs 2,212 crore and Zoom Developers Pvt Ltd with Rs 2,012 crore.
