Loans regularised loans under the central bank’s special loan rescheduling and one-time exit policy will be eligible to get the loan moratorium facility for this year owing to the pandemic.
The borrowers who rescheduled their defaulted loans under the special loan rescheduling policy will get until June next year to pay instalment if they fail to pay this year, said a central bank notice on Wednesday.
Following the outbreak of coronavirus in Bangladesh, the central bank on March 19 asked banks not to downgrade the classification of any loans for the borrowers’ failure to furnish loan instalments until June 30. That facility has been extended twice to December 31.
Regularised loans under the central bank special loans rescheduling and one-time exit policy was barred from the moratorium facility.
Banks rescheduled a record amount of defaulted loans in 2019 in their frantic efforts to minimise or, in other words, to make the ever-growing default loans look small.
That year, default loans amounting to Tk 50,434 crore were rescheduled, up 117.3 per cent from a year earlier owing to the central bank’s relaxed policy.
Along with the existing loan rescheduling policy, the central bank on May 16 last year issued a special policy on loan rescheduling and one-time exit for defaulters to reduce the high amount of defaulted loans.
Under the special policy, defaulters got the opportunity to regularise their loans for 10 years, including one year’s grace period, at 9 per cent interest rate, just by making a 2 per cent down payment.