Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukharjee today assured the investors of Life Insurance Corporation of India that they would not lose any money on account of the recent unearthing of the housing loan racket involving some top officials of the LIC Housing Finance Ltd.
"There is no cause for any axiety for the investors as not even a single paise would be lost by them due to aberrations of one or two officers in the organisation," Mukherjee said inuagurating the 109th divisional office of LIC here.
He asserted that those officials involved in the scam would not be allowed to escape.
"LIC is very strong and stable.It is too big an institution and its smooth functioning would not be affected by the aberrations of one or two officers of the organisation", he said.
The Minister said no guilty person would be allowed to escape from the process of law as stern action would be taken against them.
Mukherjee said there were several "doubting Thomases" over bringing the private sector to the insurance business on the assumption that the public sector LIC of India could not compete with the private sector in such a scenaior.
Their predictions had been proved wrong considering the growth of the LIC. If LIC had grwon by 20 per cent during the decade before the liberalisation it had grown by by 27 per cent in the post liberalisation period.
Maintaining that Indian financial insttutions were strong and stable, Mukherjee said that many major banks had collapsed in the USA and the Europen Union following the global economic meltdown two years ago and millions of millions of dollars of the investors had been lost in those countries.
However, India had withstood the meltdown without burdening the tax payers as the Banks and other fiancial institutions were very strong and stable,he said.
The LIC Housing Finance Services Limited had disbursed over Rs.44,000 crore as loans so far while its loans to builders worked out to only 11.8 per cent. The non-performing assets stood at 0.08 per cent, he added.
