According to highly placed sources, the three officials -- a general manager (operations) and an assistant general manager (services) of the Vadodara head office and a deputy general manager associated with the Gandhi Road, Ahmedabad, office -- had been named in several cases of non-recoverable loans in the recent past.

All three retired in the past four months, but face inquiries from the bank as well as the vigilance department. A freeze was clamped on their salaries, provident funds and other superannuation benefits after they were discovered to be sanctioning major loans to several companies that declared insolvency soon afterwards, sources say.

According to sources, the officials should have been alerted by the rising number of bad debts and followed more stringent procedures while sanctioning loans.

While sources said the amount involved was more than Rs 200 crores, confirmation of the figure was not available from the Mumbai head quarters of the bank. Repeated attempts by Express Newsline to contact bank chairman and managing director K Kannan in Mumbai for details proved futile.

However, Kannan had acknowledged the involvement of the senior officials in the bad debts during his visit to Vadodara last month, but had sidestepped further questions. Talking to Express Newsline, he had said that the BoB management had taken up the issue with the Government of India and sought amendments in the service manual of senior officials to find ways to deal with such cases. He said the present provisions in the manual were inadequate to decide on action against involved officials.