Top 100 loan defaulters' list placed in JS

The amount of default loans in the country now stands at Tk 111,347 crore as of April 2017, Finance Minister AMA Muhith told parliament yesterday.

In a scripted answer, Muhith also provided names of top 100 loan defaulters, but he did not mentioned how much money they have defaulted on.

The top 20 loan defaulters are: Mohammad Elias Brothers Pvt Ltd, Jasmir Vegetable Oil Ltd, Max Spinning Mills Ltd, Benetex Industries Ltd, Dhaka Trading House, Anowara Spinning Mills, Yasir Enterprise, Quantam Power Systems Ltd, MM Vegetable Oil Products Ltd, Alppa Composite Towel Ltd, Western Marine Shipyard Ltd, Mak International, Hall Mark Fashion Ltd, Monno Fabrics Ltd, Fair Trade Fabrics Ltd, Saharish Composite Towel Ltd, Nurjahan Super Oil Ltd, Saleh Carpet Mills Ltd and SK Steel and Chowdhury Knitwear.

On June 20, the finance minister told the parliament that a total of 202,623 persons and companies, which had borrowed money from 55 state and private commercial banks, defaulted on their loans as of March 2017.

Muhith also said the National Board of Revenue has seized around 4,490 kilograms of gold in the last seven years from the airports and different other checkpoints.

There were 2,928,093 individual taxpayers in the country in 2016-17, which was expected to reach 30 lakh at the end of the fiscal year, he said.

"Some nine lakh new taxpayers were registered in the first nine months of 2016-17." Over four lakh new taxpayers submitted their returns in the same fiscal year, he said.

The government has taken various steps to bring more people under the tax net and to increase revenue collection from income tax to 50 percent from the existing 37 percent by 2020-21.