Owners of about 100 companies that were listed in an article in The New Vision as beneficiaries of bail out from government due to COVID-19 pandemic have threatened to drag Uganda Development Bank (UDB) and The New Vision to court for lying about their loan status.
The representative of the say the article that appeared in the New Vision on March 18 2021 wrongly stated that they had gotten bail out cash from government through UDB yet many of the companies listed were borrowers who had running securitized loans got from the bank in the usual normal way of borrowing.
They said that it is extremely unfair and misleading to portray a business of a borrower who borrowed a loan on bank terms and is working hard in this pandemic constrained business environment to pay the loan with interest and is having his/her security held by the bank, as a beneficiary of a non-existent “bail out” scheme.
“Many applied for their loans and had them running much way back before the corona period. It was therefore annoying to portray the normal regular borrowers who are paying their regular loans at the bank’s usual lending rate for long term borrowing of 14 to 15% to be listed as beneficiaries of a bailout from government which is actually non-existent,” a source said.
The representatives warned that if New Vision and UDB don’t come out quickly to retract or correct the story, they are likely to suffer huge law suit damages.