CHENNAI: DMK leader and Rajya Sabha member R S Bharathi has accused the Indian arm of Singapore-based DBS Bank, which merged the Chennai-based Lakshmi Vilas Bank, of violating the scheme of amalgamation; i.e., non-implementation of wage revision for employees.
In a letter to the Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Information And Broadcasting Prakash Javadekar, Bharathi wrote that the cash-rich foreign bank had not implemented the legitimate revised wages and pension as applicable to employees of the banking industry.
The DBS management has not implemented the 11th bipartite wage revision to the applicable employees of LVB recruited under IBA pay scale in India, he wrote.
The employees’ service conditions were not protected by the bank as announced in the amalgamation scheme.
The wage revision includes pension for a section of officers and employees with effect from November, 2017.
Almost 1,500 employees are affected financially, morally and fiscally by the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, a press statement said.
He has also complained that the DBS management’s approach shows no interest in taking care of Indian employees’ service conditions.
“It has been six months since the amalgamation.
Yet the customers use only the cheque books with LVB logo, and the new management is yet to take any meaningful steps to revive the activities in the bank.
Due to its indecisiveness, a considerable amount of staff left the bank fearing their future,” he said.
In November, 2020, Jawdekar announced the cabinet’s decision to merge the crisis-hit Lakshmi Vilas Bank with DBS Bank India.
The announcement was that the entire employee’s service conditions would be protected in the amalgamation of LVB with DBS Bank and the offenders would be punished.
“Since then, nothing much has happened to the stakeholders of the bank,” he wrote.
He requested Sitharaman to direct the DBS Bank management to solve this issue.
“The inaction on the part of the DBS Bank may create a bad precedent in banking amalgamation,” he said.
LVB’s troubles started when it began lending to large businesses.
It multiplied after it disbursed loans amounting to around Rs 720 crore to the investment arms of Malvinder Singh and Shivinder Singh, former promoters of pharma major Ranbaxy and Fortis Healthcare, against fixed deposits (FDs) of Rs 794 crore made with the bank by Religare Finvest in late 2016 and early 2017.
Religare was promoted by the Singh brothers.
Religare later sued the Delhi branch of LVB after the bank invoked the FDs to recover the loans.