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Businessman Vijay Kalantri, the latest to be declared a wilful defaulter by a lender as part of a government plan to purge the banking system of bad loans, says he has been wrongly labelled.
“A wilful defaulter is someone who has the capacity to pay but does not pay, or has siphoned off funds; both the cases are not applicable to me,” Kalantri told BusinessLine .
On June 2, Bank of Baroda issued a public notice labelling Vijay Kalantri, his son Vishal Kalantri and Dighi Port as wilful defaulters.
Dighi Port was jointly promoted by Balaji Infra Projects and IL&FS through a concession awarded by the Maharashtra government. Vijay Kalantri is Chairman and Managing Director of Balaji Infra Projects as well as Dighi Port before it was taken to the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) for debt resolution under the bankruptcy law.
Kalantri said he will be writing to Bank of Baroda seeking to overturn the labelling.
“We have not siphoned off funds. There is a forensic report which says everything is correct, and the bank auditor was on board. So there is nothing which is there to label me a wilful defaulter,” he claimed.
The corporate insolvency resolution process of Dighi Port is nearing completion. “The resolution process extinguishes the guarantees and rights of the promoters,” Kalantri claimed.
Dighi Port did not owe money to Bank of Baroda, but the bank stepped in to issue the public notice after its merger with Dena Bank and Vijaya Bank which were part of the consortium that had lent money to the troubled private port. “Dighi Port faltered because the government did not give it road and railway connectivity as promised. If it had,, the port would not have come to this stage; we would have made money out of it and paid off everybody,” Kalantri said, adding that the actual loan was for ₹785 crore which ballooned to ₹3,074.51 crore due to overdue interest and penalty.
“What is ₹785 crore loan — it’s not a big amount for such a big project where I have invested more than ₹1,000 crore of my personal money. The port project was started in 2004, and until 2009, I never took one rupee as loan,” he added.
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