UBI on the path for reducing capital base

Kolkata, Aug 31 (UNI) United Bank of India (UBI) has targetted 23 per cent growth in business this year to Rs 55,000 crores and was opening 50 more branches within the country this year to take their total branch network to 1368, its Chaireman and Managing Director P K Gupta here today said.

Speaking to UNI after participating in a felicitation programme of the bank, he said, "UBI was planning to approch the capital market with an Initial Public Offering(IPO) after reducing the capital base through preferential share or through innovative perpetual bond to the tune of Rs 1230 crores. But we are still awaiting the necessary green signal from the Reserve Bank of India(RBI)." "Our application to RBI was pending for the past few months and until that comes we will wait", he said replying to a query.

About the proposed size of the IPO, he said it was yet to be decided by the Board of Directors, adding that UBI's plan to convert about Rs 300 crores as the equity capital was also awaiting RBI's clearance.

Incidentally, in order to write-off the city-based bank's accumulated loss the RBI had allowed the bank to show bad debts worth Rs 278.44 crores as "writen off" from its last year's balance sheet. This had gone a long way in enabling UBI to pay a dividend to the Government after a gap of 14 long years.

Regarding his plan to open UBI's first foreign office in Dhaka as it was also pending for a long time now, Mr Gupta said the proposal had been shelved at least for the time being. "But we are still open to the idea," he said.

Earlier, 83 officers of UBI from across the country were felicitated by the Bank management for their achievement to meet the Bank's target to open one million savings bank account this year under a time bound 'Mission one million" programme.

The mission had also helped the bank to mobilise Rs 1500 crores of SB deposits thereby increasing the number of low cost deposits on one hand and bringing down the cost of fund on the other, the CMD in his speech announced.

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