Bad loans in the country’s banking system declined significantly thanks to the central bank’s proper monitoring and effective steps by respective banks to get rid of the defalut culture. Accoriding to Bangladesh Bank (BB), the default loan declined by Taka 1,379 crore in three months during the last quarter of 2010 when the total amount of bad loans came down to Taka 22,709 crore on December 31 from Taka 24,088 crore on September 30, 2010.
The classified loan also declined to 7.27 percent from 8.47 percent in the same period, bringing the rate of net default loan down to 1.28 in December from September’s 1.64 percent.
The state-owned banks, however, still remained at the top with 15.66 percent classified loans, followed by specialised banks (24.15 percent) and private bank (3.15 percent). The foreign banks operating in the country maintained the lowest 2.99 percent default loan.
The rate of default loans was higher at 19.65 percent at the public banks in September last year when it was 23.83 percent in specialised banks, 3.82 percent in private banks and 2.50 percent in foreign banks.
Another statistic of the BB showed most of the banks already achieved the required level of capital adequacy in accordance with the BASEL-II guideline. According to the guildeline, banks were supposed to mainatin 8 percent of their risk-based assets as capital adequacy by June 2010, 9 percent by June 2011 and 10 percent and above from next July and onward.
According to BB, 7-8 banks failed to achieve the target until December last year, of which four were state-owned banks.
The BB, however, asked the respective banks to take effective measures to attain the stipulated capital adequacy ratio.

News: The Independent/ Bangladesh/ Mar-17-2011