Tuesday 24 January 2017

‘The Target’ deals with plunder of Jignesh Shah’s empire

Investigative agencies like Forwards Market Commission (FMC) are government bodies who are expected to give a fair chance to both the victim and the accused during their enquiry. Unfortunately for Jignesh Shah, the FMC played puppet in the hands of powerful politicians and bureaucrats to ruin the company most strategically.  The following excerpt from Shantanu Guha Ray’s ‘The Target’ will describe how the balance of justice shifts according to priorities.

The FMC had also stated in the same letter that there was a possibility that these defaulters may have diverted the funds, and have therefore violated the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). In fact, the defaulters were found to indulge in cheating, forgery, theft, breach of trust, bank stock hypothecation, investing the default amount in purchasing benami properties and making the recovery process extremely complicated. But the FMC took no action against them at all.


Most of these defaulters have reportedly invested the default money in prime properties or elsewhere. For instance, although the EOW of Mumbai Police had arrested a defaulter, Ramesh Nagpal, Proprietor of Shree Radhey Trading Co, Saharanpur on March 1, 2016 for his inability to pay up his dues of Rs 34 crore, he had already purchased and gifted his son Sunny Nagpal, a four- bedroom flat in Kharghar, Navi Mumbai’s prime property area. Despite this fact, no action has been taken against similar other defaulters. Neither have the defaulting companies been merged nor have their bank accounts been sealed. Their managements have not been changed either.

The FMC did not take any action at all against the defaulters, despite the fact that the EOW of the Mumbai Police had established a clear money trail to the 24 defaulters also stating that no money trail was found to NSEL, FTIL or its non-executive directors.

Wednesday 18 January 2017

The perfect aim at ‘The Target’, Jignesh Shah.

With Jignesh Shah on the aim of top politicians and bureaucrats because of his quick rise to the heights people seldom dream of, the beartrap made for him was inescapable. But what they didn’t notice was that they had left a trail of footprints to follow. Shantanu Guha Ray, a former tehelka journalist, stuck to his roots of investigative journalism and deduced the ultimate truth out of it.  Ripe with myriad anonymous conversations, Shantanu has managed to create the suspense yet veil the curtains off the facts.

Here is an example of such interesting excerpt from the book:

This one was narrated to me by a bureaucrat friend in Delhi, the person spoke on condition of total anonymity. Soon after the NSEL mess happened, a few civil servants – two from the MoF and one from the DCA – sat down together to ruminate and ponder over the problem. They even got an analyst who was an expert in markets, to specifically explain the minute details of the NSEL payment crisis.

So what did the brokers do in the NSEL crisis, asked one bureaucrat?


The expert crisply summed it up as the handiwork of dubious brokers. They did a lot of things that were fundamentally illegal. They created a structured product involving a contract for simultaneous buying and selling of commodities on the NSEL platform, thereby ignoring NSEL’s dictum to inform the clients of the risks involved in such simultaneous buying and selling of commodities. Worse, there was aggressive marketing and mis- selling apparently promising assured returns in violation of NSEL’s circulars. There were various instances of funding clients that should not have been done. Yet, for such dubious deals, to avoid income-tax, business income was illegally offset with questionable losses and expenses incurred on dubious deals.

A lot of tools were used to fire the guns, bureaucratic power, political clout, police and even internal commotion, but throughout the whole scenario the target remained unchanged, Jignesh Shah.


Monday 9 January 2017

Jignesh Shah: The other side of the Target

A common bollywood story has a hero and a villain. A drama has long been playing in the backdrop of politics and stock exchange market. This drama too had a protagonist and an antagonist, but the viewers are still confused about who is who. The curtain unveiled a few days back with a well investigated script ‘The Target’.

The story of Jignesh Shah has been on a road full of ups and downs. It seems he was too focussed on reaching the horizon, but again, the road of business never comes with the  sign ‘Bumps Ahead’. Shah was awarded US-India businessman of the year in 2006, little did he know that in the coming years life was about to take a U turn. In ‘The Target’ Shantanu Guha Ray mentions:

In less than a decade, DGCX had positioned itself as a global financial hub, adjudged ‘Exchange of the Year 2013’, trading in bullion, currency and metals in Dubai (historically an important centre for trading in gold and other commodities).


This was a historical milestone for India, but in Delhi no reactions were forthcoming from the government, even the bureaucrats did not talk about the ground-breaking move. On the contrary, the government sent out feelers through the Mumbai-based Reserve Bank of India (RBI), wanting to know what was happening in Dubai, and whether or not Shah and his men were flouting the rules.

On one side where Jignesh Shah and his company were trying to restore the glory of Indian economy, everything else back home  was going wrong. Ray further clarifies this:

That was strange, if not absurd. A country that awards instant stardom to an Indian, who becomes the CEO of a global company, had no words of appreciation for an innovator and entrepreneur, who had achieved global recognition for excellence in building world-class financial institutions and services through lucid, well-regulated and well-audited processes.

However ‘cinematic’ the story may seem, all the events and characters in it are real. A lot of it has remained untold for years, but new facts have been brought in light which help us know more about the other side of the coin.

source url: http://www.newsking.us/jignesh-shah-the-other-side-of-the-target/