Recovery of Bad Loans Underway

The government’s initiatives to recover banks’ non-performing loans are to continue in the current administration in line with curbing the volume of the banking system’s sour debts and improving banks’ risk ratings, the head of the Committee for Fighting Economic Crimes announced. “We managed to reduce the NPLs’ ratio to 10.7% at the beginning of the new Iranian year (started March 21) from 15.1% in September 2013,” Kazem Palizdar was also quoted as saying by ILNA. The official noted that the volume of NPLs as of July 22, 2017, stood at 1.07 quadrillion rials ($27.4 billion), which indicates a 43% increase compared to four years ago when President Hassan Rouhani’s administration took office. However, the amount of allocated loans during the 43-month-period has doubled and indicates the fact that banks’ risk ratings have dropped compared to four years ago.