PMC Bank crisis: Account holders stage protest outside Bombay High Court, Twitter flooded with anger

The account holders of PMC Bank assembled outside Bombay High Court on Wednesday demanding justice. They said the government should take a certain level of accountability for what has happened and should do something more about this issue.

HDIL promoters, Rakesh and Sarang Wadhawan have been remanded in police custody until October 14. Waryam Singh, former chairman of PMC was also sent to police custody.

Holding signs at the protest read “PMC scam is on you, Mr Modi,” “Black Diwali for account holders,” “No Bail, only Jail,” “My money, my right” and many more.

Demanding that culprits should get severe punishments, protestors took to the streets asking RBI to make an example out of the culprits. “They spoiled our Dusshera and are set to ruin our Diwali as well,” said PMC Bank account holder protesting outside Bombay HC.

On September 24, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) asked the multistate co-operative bank to stop operations for six months and capped withdrawals at ₹1,000 per account, an amount which was later increased to ₹25,000. Probes led the Economic Offences Wing to find that the bank officials, between 2008 and 2019, deliberately violated banking norms and showed false profits to mislead the authorities, although the bank was actually incurring losses.

Economic Offences Wing also found that the bank veiled the group's large exposure and non-performing assets (NPAs) from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) by creating dummy accounts. The bank had allegedly opened a number of dummy accounts to replace the stressed accounts held by Wadhawans-led HDIL.

The Chairman and Managing Director of real estate developer HDIL were both arrested on October 3 in connection with the ₹6,500 crore loan default case that has hit the Punjab & Maharashtra Co-operative (PMC) Bank.

Netizens took to Twitter to express their anger and frustration. Here are a collection of the tweets: