Mumbai: In what may calm harried depositors of Yes Bank, its administrator Prashant Kumar said Monday he is hopeful of the moratorium on the private sector lender being lifted by Saturday.
Merging Yes Bank with itself will have a ‘negative impact’ on State bank of India (SBI), and an independently running institution should continue to do so after some help, Kumar, the former CFO of SBI, said, dismissing speculation of an amalgamation.
Kumar also said that life insurance behemoth LIC was never approached for infusing capital and is not part of the plan now as well.
Kumar was installed as the administrator of the bank by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last Thursday, after the central bank superseded Yes Bank’s board as it found that there was no headway in capital raising plans.
“We are hopeful that we will be able to work around, where the moratorium will be lifted by this weekend,” Kumar said, making it clear that moratorium lift-off and the capital raising plans are ‘unconnected’. “The trigger (for the lift-off of moratorium) will be approval of final (resolution) plan by RBI,” he added.
Yes Bank has been put under a moratorium by the RBI till April 3, and customers are not allowed to withdraw more than Rs 50,000 from their accounts.
Kumar said it is possible that depositors may make a beeline to withdraw or transfer their deposits out of the bank once the moratorum is lifted and added that while there is no case for the depositors to act this way, Yes Bank has commitments from both the RBI and SBI to help with liquidity.
Meanwhile in a separate development the Congress demanded Monday that Prime Minister Narendra Modi answer as to who was responsible for the Yes Bank crisis instead of adopting diversionary tactics by raising the sale of a painting by Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to the bank’s founder Rana Kapoor for Rs 2 crore.
Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala also raised the issue of Modi addressing a business conference in Delhi sponsored by Yes Bank after the RBI put a moratorium on money withdrawal from the bank.
“Who is responsible for letting the YES Bank sink and people’s earnings go down the drain? Was Modi Government sleeping on the wheel or was it complicit in a deliberate sinking of the YES Bank? Modi Ji, you need to answer instead of diverting the issue,” Surjewala told reporters. “Prime Minister, you need to tell the nation what is the BJP’s connection to the Yes Bank and its owner,” he added.
Agencies