Sonali Bank would make a drive to recover classified loans from top 20 defaulters as the bank wants to recover from its sorry-state of liquidity crisis.

“We took strong steps to recover the default loans as it is the main problem of the bank,” Managing Director Pradip Kumar Dutta told a press conference at its headquarters in Dhaka Tuesday.

The state-owned bank has overdue loans of Tk40bn. It realised Tk2.38bn till June 30 this year from the top defaulters as compared to Tk20m as of June last year.

The bank faced liquidity crisis in 2012 due to loan scams and as a result, it failed to provision even the regulatory cash reserve requirement (CRR) and had to pay a penalty of Tk800m for the failure.

The managing director said the bank has become capable of provisioning the CRR from this month while having an investible fund of around Tk50bn.

The classified loans of the bank increased rapidly mainly because of the big default loans and the central bank’s new guideline, he said.

“We hope the capital deficit and default loans will come down within December.”

According to a Soanli Bank statement, capital deficit of the bank increased to Tk52bn as of June 30 this year while provision shortfall increased to Tk5.76bn on June 30. The operating profit dropped to Tk1.8bn and total income fell to Tk600m during this period.

On the other hand, the total expenses increased to Tk3.20bn. The number of losing branches of the bank stood at 53 in June 30, 2013 compared to 60 of last year.