Anurag Jain's Blog
Sunday, February 20, 2005

Haridas Mundhra: GrandDad of Harshad Mehtas and Ketan Parikhs!

Recently, a close friend asked me my ideas on White-Collar Crime (WCC). Now, I ain't no expert on the subject. However, I had submitted a paper on WCC long time back as a part of my course work. Some Dope.

When one talks about WCC, immediate names that come to mind are:
Corporates
# Union Carbide executives for scotching the responsibility of Bhopal Tragedy.
# HLL Executives for disowning the responsibility of discharging mercury-laden effluent to a gorgeous lake in Kodaikanal.
Capital Markets
# Harshad Mehta
# Ketan Parikh
International
# Mike Milken, junk bond trader
# Nick Leeson aka Rogue Trader. (Think Barings Bank).
Computing
# Kevin Mitnick. THE legendary hacker!
# Dmitri Sklyarov (of Elcomsoft). Russian. Advanced eBook Processor, software that can crack protections on Adobe Systems' eBook.
# Jon Johansen, a 16-year-old Norwegian. DVD Decryption program: DeCSS.

But did you know that before all these gentlemen happened, there was Haridas Mundhra. We are talking vintage here: circa 1957! Haridas Mundhra was a businessman based out of Delhi/Calcutta. What Haridas did was that he colluded with the bureaucrats and politicians in power and manipulated Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) shares. Mundhra owned a number of companies which were not performing all that well. Mundhra was artificially keeping their stock prices high and when doing so became unsustainable, he enlisted the help of the then Finance Minister T T Krishnamachari (aka TTK). TTK and Mundhra came out with a brilliant scheme: They made LIC buy shares of Mundhra's in-the-red companies! (Sounds familiar? Rings a bell, eh?) And so the happy association went on until the lid on the scam was blown over, leading to the resignation of TTK.

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