Bank With Amit Shah as Director Collected Most Banned Notes: RTI

The Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank (ADCB) secured deposits of Rs 745.59 crore in banned notes in five days.

BJP Amit Shah addresses a gathering at the party headquarters in New Delhi, in a file photo. (Photo: PTI)

A district cooperative bank, which has Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Amit Shah as a director, netted the highest deposits among such banks of old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes that were abruptly demonetised on 8 November 2016, according to RTI replies received by a Mumbai activist.

The Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank (ADCB) secured deposits of Rs 745.59 crore of the spiked notes in just five days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the demonetisation announcement.

All the district cooperative banks were banned from accepting deposits of the banned currency notes from the public after 14 November 2016 – five days after demonetisation – on fears that black money would be laundered through this route.

According to the bank's website, Shah continues to be a director with the bank and has been in that position for several years. A screenshot of the same is attached below.

A screenshot of the website’s page listing the Board of Directors shows Amit Shah on its board of directors.(Photo: The Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank Official Website)

He was also the bank's chairman in 2000. The ADCB's total deposits on 31 March 2017 were Rs 5,050 crore and its net profit for 2016-17 was Rs 14.31 crore.

Right behind the ADCB is the Rajkot District Cooperative Bank, whose chairman Jayeshbhai Vitthalbhai Radadiya is a Cabinet minister in Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani's government. It got deposits of old currencies worth Rs 693.19 crore.

Interestingly, Rajkot is the hub of Gujarat BJP politics – Prime Minister Modi was first elected from there as a legislator in 2001.

Incidentally, the figures of Ahmedabad-Rajkot DCCBs are much higher than the apex Gujarat State Cooperative Bank Ltd, which got deposits of a mere Rs 1.11 crore.

The amount of deposits made in the State Cooperative Banks (SCBs) and District Central Cooperative Banks (DCCBs) – revealed under RTI for first time since demonetisation – are astounding.

Manoranjan S Roy, the RTI activist who made the effort to get the information, to IANS

The RTI information was given by the Chief General Manager and Appellate Authority, S Saravanavel, of the National Bank for Agriculture & Rural Development (NABARD).

It has also come to light, through the RTI queries, that only seven public sector banks (PSBs), 32 SCBs, 370 DCCBs, and a little over three-dozen post offices across India collected Rs 7.91 lakh crore – more than half (52 percent) of the total amount of old currencies of Rs 15.28 lakh crore deposited with the RBI.

The break-up of Rs 7.91 lakh crore mentioned in the RTI replies shows that the value of spiked notes deposited with the RBI by the seven PSBs was Rs 7.57 lakh crore, the 32 SCBs gave in Rs 6,407 crore and the 370 DCCBs brought in Rs 22,271 crore. Old notes deposited by 39 post offices were worth Rs 4,408 crore.

Information from all the SCBs and DCCBs across India were received through the replies. The seven PSBs account for around 29,000 branches – out of the over 92,500 branches of the 21 PSBs in India – according to data published by the RBI. The 14 other PSBs declined to gave information on one ground or the other. There are around 1,55,000 post offices in the country.

Fifteen months after demonetisation, the government had announced that Rs 15.28 lakh crore – or 99 percent of the cancelled notes worth Rs 15.44 lakh crore – were returned to the RBI treasury.

Roy said it was a serious matter if only a few banks and their branches and a handful post offices, apart from SCBs and DCCBs, accounted for over half the old currency notes.

At this rate, serious questions arise about the actual collection of spiked notes through the remaining 14 mega-PSBs, besides rural-urban banks, private banks (like ICICI, HDFC and others), local cooperatives, Jankalyan Banks and credit cooperatives and other entities with banking licenses, the figures of which are not made available under RTI.

Manoranjan S Roy

The SCBs were allowed to exchange or take deposits of banned notes till 30 December 2016 – for a little over seven weeks – in contrast to district cooperative banks which were allowed only five days of transactions.

The prime minister during his demonetisation speech had said that Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes could be deposited in bank or post office accounts from 10 November till close of banking hours on 30 December 2016, without any limit. "Thus you will have 50 days to deposit your notes and there is no need for panic," he had said.

After an uproar, mostly from BJP allies, the government also opened a small window in mid-2017, during the presidential elections, allowing the 32 SCBs and 370 DCCBs – largely owned, managed or controlled by politicians of various parties – to deposit their stocks of the spiked notes with the RBI. The move was strongly criticised by the Congress and other major Opposition parties.