Banks hiring tough guys to recover cars

LAHORE - Financial institutions are hiring the services of tough guys for recovering money from defaulting customers. Incidents of scuffles and roughing up of customers on roads especially at night have become common.
The leasing of cars by the banks has risen manifold in the last few years. Cars are leased out at even 15 percent down payment. Sometimes people lag behind in paying the instalments.
Though the State Bank does not allow banks to use pressure tactics for recoveries they have now started hiring the services of tough guys to do so. Usually armed with weapons they use foul language and often beat the defaulting customers. Interestingly at times even a system error in the bank could unleash them on the customer, who never defaulted.
On Monday night businessman Ashraf Babbur, who has shops in Azam Cloth Market in Shalmi area, was going back to his home along with his son when four men on motorbikes intercepted his Honda City car LRU 2225 on Davis Road at 9:30 pm. “I first thought that they were car snatchers.
They said they were employees of Standard Chartered Bank and that I had defaulted. They asked me to hand over the vehicle to them. Using abusive language they boarded the car and asked me to drive to Kashmir Road where the bank’s warehouse was.
They used such abusive language in front of my son that I almost broke into tears. They continued to harass me for one hour till the bank officer Abdul Nasir arrived,” Babbur said while talking to The Nation.
Interestingly two policemen on patrol in the area Shahid Mahmood and Muhammad Azam came on the scene and prevented the tough guys from roughing up Babbur and his son. They stayed at the scene the whole time and asked them to show their identity, which they failed to provide.
The bank officer later came and showed his identity. He announced that he was seizing the car and Babbur could contact the bank later. Babbur insisted that he had not defaulted. But he could not prove anything as the file that could prove his innocence was at home in Model Town. Nasir in the end made him agree to proceed to the bank’s Tufail Road branch.