Banks Invent New Way of Cheating Customers

Debtors are promised to take payment at a low rate, and then it turns out...

Deceptions of customers have become frequent in the Azerbaijani commercial banks, regarding those who have taken loans in dollars. In order to make citizens pay for the debts continuously growing since the collapse of the manat, the banks allow them to repay the loan at a lower rate. The customers agree to such conditions and pay the debt. Later, however, it appears that the contract is not valid, and the bank demands returning the remainder of the loan at the real exchange rate.

‘As a rule, such agreements are concluded in words and have no legal effect. Banks cheat their customers this way and cause them to pay their dollar debts,’ a member of the Bar Association and founder of the Anti Collector law firm, Akram Hasanov, told Turan. After the beginning of the growth of the dollar to Azerbaijani currency many citizens, especially business owners, having a large debt, have been refusing to repay their loans. The reason is the creeping devaluation. Foreign currency loans to citizens grow after the dollar and the process has no end in sight, the expert said.

‘Many customers refuse to repay loans not because they do not have the opportunities. They just do not want to return a sum many times greater than the one they took from the bank. The borrowers find it unfair. The banks also tend to recover their money by deception.’ Hasanov called on citizens to be vigilant.

In general, the crisis with the payment of bank loans is caused by the lack of real government steps. Recall that, according to the decision of the Minister of Finance Samir Sharifov, dollar borrowers were denied compensation. Not satisfied was the offer of the expert community to transfer foreign currency loans of the population into AZN, and to conduct re-lending by creating a special entity at the Central Bank. The situation with foreign exchange debt continues to heat up. It came to administrative arrests of distressed debtors. Lawyers believe the arrests are illegal.

Meanwhile, the Central Bank believes the situation with problem loans has improved. The reason for the strange optimism was information about the fall of the volume of "bad debts" by 0.3%. However, experts believe such statements are not serious. Official statistics says nothing on the real volume of bad debts, and they are many times higher than the figures referred to by the Central Bank, said Hasanov.

According to official figures, at the beginning of August the proportion of bad debts in the loan portfolios of commercial banks amounted to 1 billion 504.4 million AZN. The banks, where the state is one of the founders, issued loans of 5 billion 417.8 million AZN (drop by 25.7%), or 32.4% of the total loans. Private banks issued 10 billion 784.5 million AZN (drop by 22.3%), or 64.5% of the total loans. The rest is accounted for by non-bank credit organizations. -0-