Maharashtra reverses decision: Govt to extend loan guarantee to cooperative sugar factories
Reversing its decision to not give government guarantee on loans to sick cooperative sugar factories, the state government’s cooperative department Wednesday issued a government resolution to extend the same.
As per the government resolution issued, the Maharashtra State Central Cooperative Bank (MSCCB) will offer the loan at 8 per cent rate which will be paid in the span of eight years. Failing to do so would lead to the state government repaying the loan amount.
The move comes on the backdrop of a similar guarantee offered by the state government in July amounting to Rs 548 crore from the National Cooperative Development Corporation (NCDC) at the rate of 9.46 per cent. The beneficiaries of that decision were the sugar factories controlled by the leaders of ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which included Ranjitsinh Mohite-Patil, Harshvardhan Patil, Dhananjay Mahadik, Abhimanyu Pawar and Raosaheb Danve.
The present decision was taken after Ajit Pawar along with eight other Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leaders joined the government on July 2.
The cooperative department is presently being controlled by Dilip Walse-Patil of the NCP, which is known to have its control over the state’s cooperative sugar sector with its leaders controlling many of the cooperative sugar factories.
The decision now is likely to benefit many of the factories controlled by the NCP.
The Shinde-Fadnavis government had taken the decision to not stand guarantee for the bank loans in January 2023 based on the Rajgopal Deora committee report which had based it on the history of defaulting factories.
The government had to shell out over Rs 1,200 crore in the past after sugar factories failed to repay the loans.
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