NPL Penalty Waiver Ceiling to Increase

Governor of the Central Bank of Iran Valiollah Seif announced that the second phase of waiving late payment penalties for non-performing loans will be implemented soon. In the second phase of waiving NPL fines, the ceiling will increase from 100 million rials ($2,800) to 250 million rials ($6,500), and detailed regulations will be announced in the future. About 22,500 billion rials ($0.6 billion) were allocated to the banking system to waive late payment penalties and they will receive 54 trillion rials ($1.4 billion) in the current year for the same purpose. Since February 2017, when the Cabinet first approved the waiver of penalties for non-performing loans, about 8 trillion rials ($213 million) in fines were waived and the banking system recovered more than 1.6 trillion rials ($426 million) in bad debt.