Corporation Bank to sell NPAs worth Rs 400 crore

Corporation Bank is planning to put stressed assets aggregating Rs 400 crore on the block in this quarter so as to clean up its balance sheet and shore up its bottom line.

As of December-end 2010, the Mangalore-headquartered public sector bank's gross non-performing assets (NPAs) rose to Rs 914 crore, compared with Rs 752 crore as of December-end 2009. Out of the bank's total exposure of Rs 212 crore to coffee growers in Karnataka, loans aggregating to Rs 120 crore have turned sticky in this fiscal.

The bank will shortly invite bids from asset reconstruction companies (ARCs) to sell the assets on ‘as-is-where-is-and-what-is-where-is basis', said Mr Ramnath Pradeep, Chairman and Managing Director.

“Besides selling the stressed assets, we will also be conducting recovery camps at various centres across the country,” he said. The bank has recovered Rs 328 crore from NPAs in this fiscal so far.

Banks prefer to sell NPAs which are over five years old to ARCs. The benefit accruing to banks from sale of sticky loans is that their gross NPAs get reduced and provisioning to the extent of the receipt gets added to the bottom line, according to Mr P. Rudran, MD and CEO, India SME ARC.

Banks — including Union Bank of India, Central Bank of India, Dena Bank, Bank of Baroda, Bank of India, State Bank of India, UCO Bank — are believed to have put sticky assets aggregating Rs 3,000 crore on the block since the beginning of this fiscal. However, actual sales would have been just about 10 per cent because of wide gap in perception when it comes to valuation of the assets between banks and ARCs.

On the status of loans given to coffee growers, bank officials said the Reserve Bank is disinclined to treat this exposure, a chunk of which has turned sticky, as standard assets under the Coffee Debt Relief Package, 2010. They pointed out that despite earlier relief packages, coffee growers had not paid up.

Meanwhile, Corporation Bank has reported a 25 per cent increase in net profit at Rs 382 crore in the third quarter ended December 31, 2010, compared with Rs 305 in the corresponding quarter last year.