ISLAMABAD, July 19: A spokesman for the People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP), Senator Farhatullah Babar, said the party was shocked by the Habib Bank Limited acknowledgment that loans worth billions of rupees owed by over 11,000 influential people were written off during the last three years.

“This is a monumental financial scandal, which calls for a thorough probe and punishment to those who siphoned off the depositors’ money from the bank and those who colluded in it”, he said in a statement here on Saturday.

He said the bank had defended this “plunder” by saying that it “followed a completely transparent and well-defined policy on write-offs.” The PPP senator said the bank had claimed that “all write-offs comply strictly with policy.”

“It amounts to saying that stealing and plundering of public funds comply strictly with the policy of netting only the representatives of the people and allowing the big and powerful to break the net of law”, he added.

He said the bank’s claim that the names of loan defaulters had been put on its website was wrong. “There are no more than 350 names on the HBL website out of the total of over 11,000 defaulters acknowledged by the bank in reply to a parliamentary question”, he said.

Mr Babar said during the military regime of Gen Pervez Musharraf the Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan had sent 110 small farmers of Mirpur Khas in Sindh to jail for the recovery of a mere Rs9 million owed by all of them. He said the pleas of the poor farmers that they be given some respite because of drought were not heeded.

The PPP demands to know the names of all 11,000 defaulters and names of all those who had the power and clout to make the recoveries from them in the words of the bank “totally impossible”.