It is amazing that there have been so many frauds in India – and worse promoters who cheated the institutions. Well here is a list of people whom I have known/met during my life. A couple of them still read the blog so I am not naming perhaps the top 2/3 of them. When I talk to them they talk like paragons of virtue even though they have cost the country a few ’00 crores.

I am not beginning in the right order, but in terms of intelligence, diligence, research and hard work – R Subramanian (Subhiksha) will have to fight for the first slot with Ashwin Mehta – yes, Harshad’ brother. He had tons of research on psu shares at a time when others had not even heard the word ‘psu’ . He had those shares by the tonnes…and he could have made a couple of billion from that alone!

R Subramaniam of course of Subhiksha needs no introduction, does he? Is he a fraudulent person? well I have only a peripheral view of the cases in which he is involved, so I will not comment. However his IIT and IIM track record, marks…he borders on the brilliant. Ashwin more for diligence.

Satyam’s Raju and his assisstant (forgot his name) – I met only once so will not be able to pass a judgement, but surely they did build a big company which did not go under even when such a big disclosure was made. They sure did create some value for the economy.

CRB – C R Bhansali – well he ran a big group – including a bank which was about to commence operations! nbfc, mutual fund and then bank! thwarted in the bud. His office was very close to our office…once upon a time. Now no clue where is he.

Ketan Parekh – the modus operandi was more or less a copy of the Harshad banking scam. Hometrade (they  paid me 10x for a job which I did for them) and the office, the mega TV, the laptops, the number of Vee Pees – in retrospect looked so outrageous. No clue who funded the fun trips.

And I had an excel sheet where I had all these people’s phone numbers and addresses – and now I do not even know where that sheet is.

Look at my luck, I did not do any significant business with any of them…

Then there are other Indian promoters who had manufacturing units/ business other than nbfc – Silverline, Shaan Interwell, Indiana Dairy, Krishna wall ropes, ……well they came, they borrowed, they disappeared. One of the promoters committed suicide 🙁 .

Then of course is the mother of all – Nsel. This is another difficult to understand case. Jignesh Shah is (was) an extremely hard working, brilliant businessman. Make no mistake.

And in many of the cases, the person who suffers the most and looks like the creator of the fraud, could be a victim. This over coffee, not in writing.

The Nse itself was not a great organisation. In 1994 we knew of people who would leak data – which broker bought/ sold etc..and we knew brokers who accessed such data and used it. Then it was up to Debashis and Sucheta (Moneylife) to do a detailed research on the modus operandi of the Algo scam…well read this too…

https://www.bloombergquint.com/law-and-policy/2018/08/17/top-nse-officials-facilitated-co-location-fraud-says-sebi-show-cause-notice#gs.quKK5x4