Standard wins Indian settlement

STANDARD CHARTERED'S prospects of retrieving a substantial part of the pounds 343m it lost last year in a Bombay stock exchange scandal rose sharply yesterday when National Housing Bank of India agreed a settlement of pounds 25.9m.

This is the first settlement of any of the claims made by Standard against Indian and other banks, including ANZ, Citibank and HSBC. Standard said it had been paid all it had claimed.

Malcolm Williamson, chief executive of Standard, used the bank's first success in retrieving funds to urge the other banks involved to settle rather than go through the courts.

He said: 'We shall continue to pursue our claims with other counter-parties and hope that they will respond as positively and constructively as the National Housing Bank has done in this case.'

Standard has made bad debt provisions of pounds 270m against its losses in India, pounds 73m less than its exposure, but has not yet decided on the accounting treatment of the repayment.

It may decide not to write back the bad debt provisions until the whole of the pounds 73m gap has been filled. But City hopes that the bank will be able to reduce its provision were reflected in a 24p share price rise to 968p.

Standard is pursuing more than a dozen banks for payment for securities it says it delivered but which were not paid for at the time the irregularities in the Bombay market came to light. There are a number of counter-claims against Standard.

The bank has a reputation for making money out of lawsuits, with a pounds 25m settlement in Hong Kong over losses at a company called Miniscribe and Adollars 71m over the Australian group GPI Leisure, both in 1992. A dollars 335m award against the auditors Price Waterhouse in the US is to be retried.