Bank Melli has managed to reduce bad debts by 60 trillion rials in the past Iranian year, the managing director of the bank announced.
“One of our biggest achievements in the last year was to resolve many cases of pending receivables or non-performing loans (NPLs),” Abdonnaser Hemati said in a seminar held in the bank on Sunday to review the performance of the legal department in addressing the bad loans, IRNA reported.
Hemati noted that the reduction of NPLs and restoring the some of the bad loans into the economic cycle “will pave the way to provide new loans to the manufacturing sector.”
Praising the legal department’s performance in the last Iranian year that ended March 20, Kavous Irajpour, head of the debt resolution unit said, “effective client verification is an easy solution to resolve bad debts.”
To this end, he highlighted certain measures taken by the bank as “reviewing the contracts with clients, mechanizing the debt documents and executive and legal steps, improving training process by holding workshops and issuing systemic notices to debtors and their guarantors.”
The NPLs of commercial banks reached 938 trillion rails in the month ending November 21, 2014, according to the Central Bank of Iran.
Mellat Bank is also another bank to have effectively reduced its NPLs during the past year, as announced by CEO of Tarh Andisheh Behsaz Mellat Co. Naser Tahbaz in mid-January.
CBI officials worry that rising NPLs could further jeopardize the banks, urging the financial institutions to do their best to minimize their bad debts.
