Bank officers’ union opposes Alternative Mechanism

Chennai, Aug 24 (IANS) The All India Bank Officers' Confederation (AIBOC) on Thursday strongly condemned the government's decision to set up an Alternative Mechanism (AM) to oversee proposals to merge public sector banks.

In a statement issued here AIBOC said: "This organisation has time and again criticised such forced mergers and we will continue to protest such ill conceived plans of merger of Public Sector Banks by government, Niti Ayog and RBI which can wreak havoc on India's financial mainstay."

According to the statement, the claims of merging six banks with the State Bank of India and making the latter a strong bank from April 1, 2017 onwards has turned out to be false.

"Leading up to the All Fool's Day merger, in mid-February 2017, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley was confident the step would make the bank a global player; a month later, SBI chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya indicated that she expected to boost the bank's annual profit by Rs 3,000 crore in three years," AIBOC said.

"When SBI declared its results on May 19, analysts discovered, to their horror, that the path to global greatness lay through a minefield of subsidiaries's losses, estimated at Rs 5,792 crore in the quarter ended March 2017 and Rs 10,243 crore for the full year," the statement added.

Excluding non-banking SBI subsidiaries such as life and general insurance, which reported annual profits of nearly Rs 2,000 crore, the losses would have been higher, AIBOC said.

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