The Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation (DICGC) on Thursday said it has settled the main claim aggregating Rs 3,791.55 crore of Punjab & Maharashtra Cooperative Bank Ltd (PMCBL) for 8,47,506 traceable depositors. Unity SFB has instantly credited the deposit sum in all those depositors’ bank accounts with their holders sending confirmation of their credit balance on the Unity Bank App. DICGC has asked depositors of the erstwhile PMCBL (transferor bank) to contact the transferee bank (Unity Small Finance Bank) for receipt of their claim amount.
How Much Will PMC Account Holders Get?
Under the scheme of amalgamation, Unity SFB will pay the amount it receives from DICGC to all the eligible retail depositors of PMCBL (transferor bank), which would be an amount equal to the balance in their deposit accounts or Rs 5 lakh, whichever is less.
Depositors with deposits over Rs 5 lakh will get their monies, depending on their balances, over 10 years from the appointed date. No interest on any of the interest-bearing deposits with the transferor bank will accrue after March 31, 2021, for a period of five years from the appointed date.
Thereafter, simple interest at the rate of 2.75 per cent per annum will be paid at the end of each year for the amounts remaining outstanding which will be payable from the date after five years from the appointed date.
Unity SFB was born out of the rescue of the tainted PMC Bank, whose erstwhile promoters had siphoned off funds, missing their obligations to depositors. Centrum now owns 51 per cent of Unity and the remaining is held by RIPL.
PMC Scam
Scam-hit PMCBL was merged with Unity SFB with effect from January 25, 2022 (the appointed date for the merger), as per a scheme of amalgamation.
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Unity SFB will primarily be a digital bank where new shareholders have pooled capital of over Rs 3,000 crore by way of cash and warrants. The capital will be used to build the base for the bank. Earlier in October, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had issued a small finance bank license to a consortium of Centrum Financial Services, and Resilient Innovation (RIPL), which has a leading digital payments platform called BharatPe. This is the first time after a gap of nearly six years that the central bank has issued a new bank license.
A loan of Rs 6500 crore was given to a developer through fake accounts in PMC Bank. The information about this scam was known to the Reserve Bank in the year 2019. The Reserve Bank had imposed strict restrictions on the bank in September 2019. RBI’s Moratorium is in place from September 23, 2019. Under this, withdrawal restrictions were imposed on the depositors of the bank. RBI had dissolved the board of PMC Bank.
As of March-end 2021, PMC Bank had deposits aggregating Rs 10,535 crore. Of this, about 70 per cent are retail deposits and the rest are institutional deposits, including other urban co-operative banks (216) and co-operative societies (1,750).
