"Yes, we had to resort to violence at times. We would slap them (loan defaulters) or kick them. We had to use some violent means," he says. D’Cruz alleges recovery gangs bribe the police, even their “head” brass, who then refuse to take complaints of loan defaulters.
That’s what happened to Jowett when he went to the police to complain against the recovery agents who had snatched his car. "The Sub-Inspector was reluctant to file my complaint," alleges Jowett.
CNN-IBN tried to catch Sub-Inspector Jivba Dalvi, who allegedly refused to take Jowett's complaint, on hidden camera while he was making a deal with undercover reporters on recovering a bad debt.
Dalvi noticed the camera and panicked. "I just request you to keep me out of it . Please, dar lagta hai (I am scared)—you just see my purse," he pleaded with the reporters.
Dalvi allegedly owns a bungalow worth Rs 50 lakh though he joined the police just a few years back, and recovery agents says they can work freely because of officers like him.
As D’Cruz says: "We would inform the police that we are going to sieze a car and if we didn’t find the car we would seek their help to locate it."
It’s for using muscle men like Johnny that a consumer court in Delhi has fined the ICICI Bank Rs 55 lakh. The bank denies using "coercive techniques" and says it has a code of conduct to recover loans.
"We will abide by whatever the court verdict is. There are certain discrepancies in what the agency has informed and what the customer has claimed and we will certainly look into those discrepancies.
We would however add that in no point of time we would justify coercive techniques or violence in our recovery process. There is a laid down code of conduct which we follow and scrupulously adhere to," says Charudutt Deshpande, Spokesperson for the ICICI Bank.
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