Lucknow/New Delhi: Manmohan Singh, a resident of Khajuria-Nibiram in Pilibhit district's Bhilsanda block and a farmer who owns eight acres of farm land, could never have imagined that he could even remotely be connected to five-star wilful defaulter Vijay Mallya.
However, the Pilibhit farmer was in for a rude shock when he realised that two of his accounts had been frozen by the bank on charges that he stood as guarantor in one of the loans the bank had lent to former liquor baron Mallya.
According to a report in Mid Day, a Mumbai branch head of Bank of Baroda wrote to the bank's Nandgaon branch asking them to freeze two of his accounts. Singh has an account in the Nandgaon Branch of Bank of Baroda and also had a farming loan account in the bank after he borrowed Rs. 4 lakh.
In fact, just before his accounts were frozen in September 2015, he had paid back Rs. 32,000 against his loans. Singh then approached the bank manager enquiring of the reason behind the bank’s move to blacklist him.
Upon knowing of the reason behind the bank’s move, Singh said he had only seen and heard about Mallya in the news, the report said, adding that it took him a lot of effort to convince the local branch manager that a humble farmer could never have stood guarantor to a multi-millionaire borrower like Mallya.
It was after the bank verified his accounts that the local manager wrote back to the Mumbai branch, asking them for permission to de-freeze Singh's accounts.
After a gruelling wait of over eight months, Singh’s accounts were finally de-frozen on Friday.
BoB officials in Mumbai could not be reached for comment. Nandgaon Branch Manager Mangeram told Jagran: "It is surprising that a small farmer was shown as a guarantor of Vijay Mallya."
Mallya, who owes over Rs 9,000 crore to a consortium of mostly state-run banks, has been on the run since March 2 when the lenders moved the Debt Recovery Tribunal against him. The Enforcement Directorate is on his trail and the government has cancelled his passport.
