Banks invest in car-jackers to recover loans

CAR SCARS: CNN-IBN finds out how recovery agents work and who helps them.

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This week on 30 Minutes, CNN-IBN exposes the muscle men banks use to lift your car and arm-twist you into making that payment.

Goa: Jowett D’Souza, a resident of Colva in Goa, bought his dream car with an ICICI Bank loan in March 2002 and paid 26 installments of the loan on time. He missed just two installments, and paid for that.

Recovery agents, who were allegedly working for the bank, beat him up and took away his car on August 6, 2004. “They gave me two blows, they pushed me and grabbed the car keys from me," D’Souza alleges. Banks have a right to recover loans but there are strict guidelines on how to do that.

The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) guidelines say banks first have send notices to defaulters, then given them reasonable time to pay up and they are forbidden from using “muscle power” to recover loans.

The ICICI Bank chose to do otherwise, and Jowett says he has evidence to prove it. He filed a Right to Information application and got Police Control Room file notings, which allegedly show that the bank had sent recovery agents against him.

"I wrote a letter to the Director of Transport in October 2004 saying that the vehicle is in dispute between me and ICICI bank and cannot be sold, " says Jowett.

But the recovery agents got round this. They forged Jowett's signature March 31, 2005 and ended the hypothecation on the car. Someone posing as Jowett on April 4 filed a complaint at the Colva police station that the car papers, including the registration certificate, had been lost.

Then on April 5 the recovery agents forged another letter and posing as Jowett asked the Regional Transport Office (RTO) to withdraw the freeze on his car’s sale.

The police’s Crime Branch on May 21 surprisingly issued a no-objection certificate and permitted the car’s transfer. Jowett's signatures were forged on May 25 and on May 30 the RTO cleared the car’s transfer to Mallapuram in Kerala.

Jowett’s lawyer, Radha Rao Gracious, calls the recovery agents “gangsters”. “The banks nowadays seem to be engaging gangsters to seize cars from the defaulters and this is done by the banks in collusion with the police,” alleges Gracious.