On May 15, RBS board passed a proposal to pay a telephone allowance of Rs 700 for the junior staffs and Rs 1,000 for senior staffs per month and increased the amount that can be borrowed by its employees by Rs 1 million, taking the total amount to Rs 3.5 million. The employees have the facility to pay back the loan in installments with negligible interest rates. [break]
The decision has been implemented without taking approval from the Ministry of Finance, sources said seeking anonymity. It is mandatory for every major financial decision of RBS to be approved by MoF.
The trade unions affiliated to different parties have been jointly protesting at the RBS office and they have padlocked the offices of top level managers saying their demands have not been met. They have even barred Administrator Ram Bahadur Khadka and Assistant Administrator Ram Shankar Khadka from entering the office premises since August 13 saying that the duo failed to meet their other demands for more benefits and not consulting them while making the decision of splitting the non-life insurance business from RBS.
Khadka said, “They have threatened me over the telephone that they would insult me at the office. They have also seized my vehicle.” His office remains padlocked since the last couple of months.
Krishna Prasad Devkota, joint secretary at MoF, said that the employees have sought hefty demands through the RBS board. Devkota said the demands includes omitting the clause of minimum 30 years of service for retirement and reducing the eligible age for drawing pension to 58 years.
They have also demanded additional retirement benefit incorporating three month´s salary for each year served. Their eight-point demand also demands a medical facility of Rs 500,000 for each employee.
The RBS employees currently draw a salary of 23 months annually.
In response to their demand, MoF has asked the employees to cooperate in the task of completing the splitting life and non-life insurance businesses, clear all the backlog audits of last 12 years and have renewal of business certificates from the Insurance Board.
However, the agitating trade unions are against the process of splitting the business, which is overdue since the last 18 years.
In another anomaly in paying the staffs, Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority has repeatedly written to MoF to recover the amount of Rs 80 million from RBS employees paid illegally under the "prize category" to all the employees. However, MoF has not bothered to implement the direction of anti-graft body.
All of the 160 RBS employees have been drawing one month salary annually as prize every year since 1994.
Sources said CIAA found that RBS has misinterpreted the permission for prize category and has been distributing the sum to all the employees in a blanket-approach, mocking the concept of rewarding the best-performers.
Devkota maintained that MoF has directed RBS to recover the sum paid under prize category. However, Nawardaj Mudbhari, an employee´s leader at RBS, tried to come clean saying that the prize is taken as allowance and CIAA has already seen the document issued by the cabinet led by late Man Mohan Adhikari in 1994.
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