The Reserve Bank of India is delaying year-end bonuses to the heads of top private banks in the country, as it questions the size of the payouts citing the lenders\u2019 performance issues, said people familiar with the matter.<\/p>\n
Chief executive officers at HDFC Bank Ltd., ICICI Bank Ltd. and Axis Bank Ltd. — the nation\u2019s largest private lenders by assets — are among bankers yet to receive bonuses for the financial year ended March 31, 2017, as the RBI hasn\u2019t signed off on the proposed payments, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information is private. They declined to give further details. Business Standard newspaper had previously reported the delays.<\/p>\n
ICICI\u2019s board had approved a bonus of Rs 2.2 crore ($340,000) for CEO Chanda Kochhar, while Axis Bank\u2019s Shikha Sharma was set to receive Rs 1.35 crore and HDFC Bank\u2019s Aditya Puri about Rs 2.9 crore, exchange filings show. A spokesman for Axis Bank declined to comment. Spokesmen for HDFC Bank and ICICI didn\u2019t reply to emails and phone calls. An email to the RBI wasn\u2019t immediately answered.<\/p>\n
Long considered healthier than their government-run peers, India\u2019s private banks have had a tough time over the past year, plagued by revelations of hidden bad loans and alleged lapses in corporate governance. Rising defaults have enraged the public, piling pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to act against the perpetrators and reinforce his anti-graft image before elections next year.<\/p>\n
Going by historical evidence, the RBI should have approved the bonuses well before March 31, 2018, said Asutosh Kumar Mishra, a Mumbai-based banking analyst at Reliance Securities Ltd. \u201cWe have never noticed such delay in approving the payouts, but then we haven\u2019t seen a year in which so many skeletons were brought out of the closet — from under-reportingof bad loans to serious governance issues.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the year ended March 2017 — for which the bonuses are under contention — an RBI audit showed Axis hadn\u2019t disclosed bad loans worth about Rs 56 billion. HDFC Bank also reported a divergence and ICICI said it isn\u2019t required to make disclosures on the topic even as provisions for bad loans climbed.<\/p>\n
Axis Bank shares rose about 10% and ICICI 17% in Mumbai trading during the year ended March 2017, while the 10-member Bankex Index added 33%. HDFC Bank shares jumped had 35% during the period.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Reserve Bank of India is delaying year-end bonuses to the heads of top private banks in the country, as it questions the size of the payouts citing the lenders\u2019 performance issues, said people familiar with the matter. Chief executive officers at HDFC Bank Ltd., ICICI Bank Ltd. and Axis Bank Ltd. — the nation\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27143,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27144,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27142\/revisions\/27144"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}