Finance Minister AMA Muhith proposed to allocate Tk5,000 crore in the new budget for next fiscal year as recapitalisation of state-owned banks that have been suffering capital shortfall in the wake of corruption.
The government has been spending public money on the state banks since the fiscal year 2013-14, following loan scandal.
The state banks have been recapitalised by public money with a total of Tk9,477 crore during the current and previous fiscal year.
According to preliminary estimation, the capital shortfall of Basic Bank stood at Tk3,000 crore, Sonali Bank Tk400 crore, BKB Tk6,643.80 crore and RKUB Tk884.56 crore at the end of December 2014.
Palli Sanchay Bank needs Tk125 crore while Grameen Bank Tk0.58 crore for improvement of their capital base.
Of the state-owned banks, BASIC’s capital base turned worse after the loan scam that took away over Tk4,400 crore between December 2009 and November 2012.
The required capital of the bank was Tk923.64 crore as on December 31, 2014 against which the bank had already negative capital of Tk2,686 crore.
Thus the bank’s capital shortfall stood at over Tk3,609 crore as on the balance sheet date. But if the bank had to meet up the provision shortfall the actual capital shortfall would have been Tk3,922 crore at the end of the year.
The required Capital Adequacy Ratio (CAR) which absorbs the risk of the bank should have been 10% of risk-weighted assets, but the bank maintained negative 29.08% in the balance sheet. The actual CAR would have been 32.46% if the provision shortfalls were maintained.
The bank has already requested the government for capital support of Tk3,000 crore though it received Tk790 crore as capital support from the government on December 29 last year.
Earlier, the Finance Division injected Tk1,500 crore to meet the shortfall of Sonali Bank and Basic Bank in December last year.
The Finance Ministry provided capital support of Tk4,100 crore into the four state-owned commercial banks to help them meet their capital shortfalls in the year 2013.
