Dear Editor,
Having read all these stories in the press about Mr Ram and the NBS, including the footnote to the ‘Business Page’ of Stabroek News dated September 27, which states that Mr Ram is a former Director of the Society, you get the impression that he is really peeved about something.
In order to fairly analyse his comments and criticisms, the logical thing for any keen observer to do is to check the facts of the Society’s operations. Lo and behold, despite the accusation of bad management, etc, one finds that NBS’s financial position is as sound as any in the industry, and its debt provisioning is way below that of the other players in the financial sector, regardless of the methodology used in its computation.
My thinking is that this is not surprising since according to its financials, the Society has over 8,000 mortgages valued at $20B with over 95% being below $8M. You do not need to be a financial expert to manage such a simplistic portfolio of loans, hence Mr Ram’s unnecessary stress (as usual) in the wrong area of the loans committee, etc, to solve all alleged problems at NBS. Was he unaware of the proviso governing loans to deposits?
Having said that, it is a tribute to the Society for making these mortgage loans so affordable that they have had to redirect persons to other financial institutions who were forced to reduce their very high spread, which Mr Ram has not analysed.
Of course, despite their flashy advertisements, many people report how difficult it is to obtain home loans when they visit their offices.
Yours faithfully,
Salim Khan
