The country’s oldest public sector financial institution, IFCI, expects cash recovery to increase to Rs 1,200 crore in the current fiscal due to “stepped up” bad loan recovery process undertaken by it.

“We have made recovery of Rs 850 crore in the three quarters of the current fiscal which should rise to Rs 1,200 crore by the end of March 2018,’’ IFCI Managing Director and CEO E S Rao told PTI.

“We have stepped up our balance-sheet cleaning process. As part of this, we are going aggressively after recovery and we hope to exceed our target for the current fiscal,’’ he said.

IFCI’s net non-performing assets stood at 26.49 per cent, while gross NPAs stood at 35.8 per cent as of end December, 2017. It had made provisions or wrote off bad debts worth more than Rs 411 crore, which resulted in the company reporting a loss of Rs 176 crore in the third quarter.

Rao said the company is also simultaneously looking at expanding its loan book. Expansion of asset book would also include take out finance where IFCI would pick up stake from other lenders in good operational infrastructure projects.

“On an average, we will be targeting a loan sanction of Rs 500 crore per month beginning next fiscal. This would include take out finance also,’’ Rao said.

Asked about capital infusion, he said the government will soon pump in Rs 100 crore through preference shares as the extraordinary general meeting of the company has just cleared the proposal. Following this, the government’s holding in the institution would increase from 55 per cent to about 56 per cent.

For the third quarter ended December 2017, IFCI had reported a standalone net loss of Rs 176.87 crore against Rs 45.17 crore for the October-December quarter of last fiscal. However, the total income rose slightly to Rs 655.53 crore during the quarter under review against Rs 635.55 crore in the year-ago period.

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