Lack Of Conscience Of Business Leaders

[G.Subramaniam]

My first post is on Anil Ambani

Ostensibly a devout hindu,
funding the islamist Samajwadi party,
funding the anti-hindu UPA

[Guest]

<b>Sathyam episode: Indian Executive Is Said to Have Siphoned Cash</b>

[G.Subramaniam]

<!--QuoteBegin-Savithri+Jan 20 2009, 03:29 PM-->QUOTE(Savithri @ Jan 20 2009, 03:29 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Sathyam episode: Indian Executive Is Said to Have Siphoned Cash</b>
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I want to make a distinction between ordinary greed and corruption
and extreme cases where anti-hindu policies are funded for the sake of money

[Guest]

I agree. I think there is a nexus between Sathyam's Raju and the Christian Andhra CM Rajasekhara Reddy. This should be investigated.

[acharya]

<!--QuoteBegin-Savithri+Jan 20 2009, 04:48 AM-->QUOTE(Savithri @ Jan 20 2009, 04:48 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->I agree.  I think there is a nexus between Sathyam's Raju and the Christian Andhra CM Rajasekhara Reddy.  This should be investigated.
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Inside news is the YSR had made lot of money by taking 10% for every project sanctioned to Raju and Maytas.

In 2004 YSR had money problem and now in 2008 he is worth $40B by some estimate. He has bought 25000 acre land in Fresno area - California according to some.

YSR is considered to be dangerous and will go after any opponent.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In 2004 YSR had money problem and now in 2008 he is worth $40B by some estimate. He has bought 25000 acre land in Fresno area - California according to some<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That can be easily tracked, I will try to check land sale records.

[Guest]

A brief history of Indian scams

In the first decade of independence all kinds of wrongdoings erupted, which have naturally gone out of public memory. For example, in 1948, the then high commissioner in London, V K Krishna Menon’s name was linked to a scandal where the Indian government had placed an order for 2,000 jeeps with a London-based firm that had false credentials. While most of the money was paid upfront, just 155 jeeps landed. As we all know, Krishna Menon went on to become Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s trusted ally and the defence minister.
Does anyone remember that in 1949, Industry minister Rao Shiv Bahadur Singh, father of Arjun Singh, was jailed for three years for taking a bribe of Rs 25,000 from gemstone trader Sachendubhai Baron for renewing his diamond- mining lease? Please note, only Rs 25,000 exchanged hands.
What was seen then as the mother of all scandals happened in 1958. Finance minister T T Krishnamachari, finance secretary H M Patel, LIC chairman L S Vaidyanathan, are some of the names linked to a scandal exposed by Indira Gandhi’s husband Feroz Gandhi, involving LIC’s investment of Rs 1.25 crore in six companies set up by Haridas Mundhra. TTK resigned as a result of the affair, and Mundhra was jailed.
Businessmen were punished with some regularity those days. In 1959 Ramakrishna Dalmia, chairman, Bharat Insurance Company, was arrested for misappropriating around Rs 2.2 crore from the company and sent to jail for two years.
In 1960, businessman Dharma Teja managed to get a Rs 22 crore loan from the government to start a shipping company, and then siphoned the money out of the country. He was arrested in Europe and jailed for six years. Must have been exciting times.
Loss of innocence
The swinging Sixties also saw its share of misdoings and blatant corruption. In 1965, Orissa chief minister Biju Patnaik (present chief minister Naveen Patnaik’s father) was forced to resign after it became known that he had favoured his privately owned company, Kalinga Tubes, in awarding a government contract. It is difficult to believe that acts like these were seen as crimes those days.
In the Seventies, Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay’s names started popping up every now and then. There was the never-quite-explained Nagarwala scandal. Nagarwala is said to have impersonated the prime minister on the phone and got State Bank of India to give him Rs 60 lakh. Both Nagarwala and the police officer who investigated the case died in mysterious circumstances soon after. In 1974 Indira Gandhi’s name came up again in the first Maruti scandal, where her son was favoured with a licence to make passenger cars in the then highly restrictive environment.
Again in 1976, in the face of falling oil prices, a $200-million contract was awarded to the Hong Kong-based Kuo Oil Co to take future deliveries at current prices. The government lost Rs13 crore. The money is supposed to have gone to Indira and Sanjay.
From the Eighties, the names Snamprogetti, and its representative Ottavio Quattrocchi started doing the rounds. In 1980 petroleum secretary H N Bahuguna, N N Kapadia, agent of many foreign companies, petroleum minister P C Sethi and K P Unnikrishnan were accused in a scandal where a consultancy contract for the Thal Vaishet project was awarded to a subsidiary of Italian Snamprogetti in violation of laid down norms.
In 1981 there was the great Maharashtra cement scandal, when chief minister A R Antulay was charged with malpractices and favouritism in giving cement meant for public consumption to private builders.
Coming of age
The political scandals got much bigger. In 1986, there were alleged kickbacks to the Indira Gandhi government in buying two submarines from German firm HDW. The scandal that refuses to die happened the next year in 1987, when Rajiv Gandhi and others were accused of receiving Rs 64 crore in payoffs for the 155mm howitzer deal from the Swedish firm Bofors.
In 1991 L K Advani, V C Shukla, C K Jaffer Sharief, Arif Mohammed Khan, Madan Lal Khurana, Kalpnath Rai, N D Tiwari and many others were accused in the Rs 64-crore Jain hawala case.
Joining the big league
With the Harshad Mehta scandal of 1991, the dimensions of money involved expanded exponentially.
Mehta, SBI, NHB, Grindlays, Citibank and Stanchart were all accused of having played a part in the Rs 10,000 crore securities scandal.
Keeping up with inflation corruption started scaling bigger heights. No more small change of a crore or two. Remember the fodder scam? When Bihar chief minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and other state politicians and bureaucrats were alleged to have siphoned off Rs 950 crore from funds meant for the state animal husbandry department? Down south in 1996, M Gopalakrishnan, former chairman and managing director of Indian Bank, and others were accused of having sanctioned huge loans totalling Rs 1,500 crore to companies without obtaining adequate collateral security.
Then came the first telecom scandal in 1996 when former communications minister Sukh Ram was charged with accepting kickbacks from a number of telecom companies in exchange for special favours. About $1 million in small-denomination rupee notes was found in the homes of Sukh Ram. Runu Ghosh, a senior official in the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), was arrested on corruption charges, including having allegedly favoured telecom equipment manufacturer Advanced Radio Masts Ltd (ARM) in purchase contracts. In the same year owners of several large shoe companies in Mumbai were arrested on charges of having floated bogus cobbler co-operatives to get low-interest loans from the Maharashtra government.
This list is only indicative and by no means exhaustive.
Bluffing gets liberalised
The rapid growth of the capital market after liberalisation has led to its fair share of financial scandals. The major shake-up happened with the Harshad Mehta episode. It exposed the utter lawlessness and absence of supervision in the money markets: Funds could be transferred with impunity from banks and corporate houses into the equity markets; thousands of crores of bank funds moved in and out of brokers’ bank accounts in what was later claimed as “accepted market practice”.
At the same time there was the Initial Public Offer (IPO) bubble. Many existing companies in the Nineties decided to make huge public offerings.
They inflated their prices to fund greenfield projects and completely unrelated diversifications.
Windmill manufacturers wanted to set up airlines. Shoemakers wanted to set up steel plants. It was a period of utter madness.
Then a whole lot of small traders, chartered accountants and businessmen, teamed up with bankers and investment bankers to float new companies and raise public funds. This caused a loss of several thousand crores of rupees and is known as the vanishing companies scandal.
All this resulted in the death of primary markets for many years.
The many faces of scams
The Nineties was also the period of many other scams. One of them was the mushrooming of non-banking finance companies (NBFC). Most of them built houses of cards, took investors for a massive ride and then rolled over and died.
Take the case of Chain Roop Bhansali’s CRB. His Rs 1,000 crore financial conglomerate comprised a mutual fund, fixed deposit collection (with hefty cash kickbacks), a merchant bank (he even lobbied head-to-head the Association of Merchant Bankers of India) and a provisional banking licence. Many of these licences required adequate scrutiny by SEBI and the RBI, and the fact that they passed muster is another reflection of those times. Bhansali managed to get favourable credit ratings and audit reports, CRB created a pyramid based on high cost financing, which finally collapsed. Bhansali, after a brief spot of trouble with the authorities, moved on to the dotcom business and the regulators were never held accountable. Millions of small investors lost their shirt. The CRB collapse caused a run on other finance companies and many cardboard empires came crashing down.
This was also the era of plantation companies.
Investors were asked invest in dubious plantation schemes. “Put money in one teak tree and you will get 1000 times the returns in seven years”, they were promised. Since they were not subject to any regulations, the plantation companies could get away with wild profit projections. The advertising companies were the real gainers.
High profile television campaigns, full-page advertisements and glossy brochures had the investors flocking for more. Almost all these projects have vanished.
In the early days of liberalisation even the government-promoted mutual funds were in trouble. Nobody anticipated stock market crashes.
Starting with the scam-hit Canstar scheme, most mutual funds had to be bailed out by their sponsor banks, or parent institutions. Then came the big bailout of Unit Trust of India. Since UTI is set up under its own Act, it was the taxpayers who paid for the Rs 4,800 crore bailout in 1999. Just three years later, it was back buying recklessly into the Ketan Parekh-manipulated scrips and suffering big losses in the process.
The record of the private mutual funds has also been patchy.
The dotcoms which became dot cons is another big story. Sadly, investors in all countries get carried away by hype and publicity. They do not have the time or the knowledge to analyse their investments. When things are going well nobody wants to know anything. Nobody questioned Satyam’s quarter-to-quarter growth and margins. Nobody wondered why the promoters were constantly disinvesting in their company.
Nobody took E A S Sarma, former secretary, department of economic affairs, seriously when he was unhappy with the Satyam balance sheet, or E Sreedharan, managing director of Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) when he alleged that the Andhra metro rail line alignment was altered and extended to benefit the bidder (Maytas), seriously.
But everybody has now woken up because this simply is the biggest case of individual scam in the country.
Sushi_r@hotmail.com
© Copyright 2008 ExpressBuzz

[G.Subramaniam]

Off topic alert

I am not concerned about ordinary scams and greedy businessmen

I want this thread to solely focus on anti-national acts like
sponsoring Samajwadi Party and
manipulating politics to weaken hindus,
despite being actively practising hindus themselves

G.S

[dhu]

About Ambani, I distinctly remember this fellow showed up at sonia's door even before the general election results were announced. The fellow had prior notice of winners.

[Guest]

How Satyam chief worked power levers

<b>Do you know that Maytas is the reverse of Satyam!</b>

K V Ramana
Saturday, January 10, 2009 4:00 IST

Hyderabad: More than the downturn in the IT services business, it is the political nexus between the Rajus and politicians that seems to have sucked Satyam Computer Services down the tube.

Sources close to Raju told DNA that the family has always enjoyed proximity to the powers that be. It was during N Chandrababu Naidu's time that chairman B Ramalinga Raju shot to fame as the poster boy of IT in the state. Obviously, Raju was serving the priorities of the Naidu government - information technology.

The change in dispensation after 2004 changed priorities for the Rajus, too. "The Congress government, led by YS Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR), has infrastructure and construction as its priority, and family company Maytas was ready to serve the purpose," a senior politician in the state explained.

In the ensuing months after the Telegu Desam Party lost power in Andhra Pradesh in 2004, chairman B Ramalinga Raju shifted his focus to strengthening Maytas --the reverse of Satyam -- which was created from family-owned construction company Satyam Construction. Maytas was converted into a public limited company in December, 2006, almost two years after the YSR government came to power.

"Most of us thought that the YSR government would create troubles for Raju since he was seen to be close to Naidu. Surprisingly, Raju managed to remain equally close to YSR," a former Telugu Desam leader said.

<b>How did he build this relationship? "Generally, corruption is seen as an offshoot of development. In this government, development is an offshoot of corruption. There is scope for anyone who can serve this purpose in the name of development," says a disgruntled Congress leader from Telangana.</b>

Sources at YSR's office confirm that the Raju brothers did indeed enjoy a good equationwith the chief minister.

Maytas is a leading contractor for various irrigation projects the state government has taken up under its Jalayagnam project and the value of contracts is over Rs 10,000 crore. In addition, the government has also given it the contract to develop the port at Machilipatnam.

Though this project is estimated to cost Rs 1,200 crore, the allotment itself had become controversial with the government planning to give Rs 300 crore of cash compensation to Maytas by making some adjustments in the location of the port.

The Hyderabad Metro, the Rs 12,000-crore project, is in a controversy of its own. Delhi Metro chief E Sreedharan had raised questions on this and suspected a political scam behind awarding the project to Maytas on a reverse grant model.

"It's a different model of corruption that's suspected to be behind the deals with Maytas or other such companies in the state. There is no cash transaction. But, the contractor gives other tangible returns to the powers that be," a source close to a senior bureaucrat said.

According to him, Maytas had agreed to give away about 200 acres of land to an immediate family member of a senior politician in return for some of the contracts it had won. This could not be independently ascertained by DNA.

The proximity between the Rajus and the YSR government can also be ascertained by the fact that the 108 emergency call service, which was started by Satyam on its own, has now been renamed as the Rajiv Arogyasri service and has been converted into a public private partnership project.
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1220339

[Guest]

"When the Rajasekhara Reddy government came to power in May 2004, the priority was to take up irrigation projects with a capital outlay of Rs 1 lakh crore under the Jalayagnam brand. For this, the government had no option but to liquidate lakhs of acres of real estate in favour of industrialists. This had a snowballing effect on the entire market with prices skyrocketing for no reason," the CEO of a property brokerage told DNA.

Not surprisingly, apart from the Satyam-Maytas combine, others big names in the game include Lanco, GMR, GVK, Hetero Drugs, Aurobindo, IVRCL, Indu Projects, Nagarjuna Construction Company and, to some extent, Dr Reddy's Laboratories have been given out land for their own projects.

These are the lands that have been allotted to them for taking up their own projects under government sanction.

But then privy to information on the prospects of the projects, something akin to insider trading on the stock markets, these industrialists are said to have amassed neighbouring lands for real estate development.

"They are the land barons now. It is not the traditional property traders but the industrial houses who have built up their land banks across the state with the blessings of the political bosses," a leading property developer said.

"The problem actually started with the government mandating its infrastructure nodal agency the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Corporation to raise the money required for Jalayagnam by auctioning the land available with it. The land in the possession of APIIC was meant for industrial infrastructure. Instead of developing the land for the industry, it had sold out the land to the companies through a bidding process. The highest bidder was given the land. May be a fair process but meant to benefit the corporates build their land banks," another realty veteran explained.
Interestingly, software star Infosys Technologies, too, is a beneficiary of the government policy and is now the owner of about 450 acres on the outskirts of Hyderabad which is earmarked for a campus.

"No one knows why Infosys needs 450 acres for a campus. The company talks about a walk-to-work concept. At the end of the day, the property is being handed out to the industrial houses in the name of job creation," a CEO of a medium size IT company said.

Companies such as Maytas and Satyam were allotted huge chunks of property for special economic zones (SEZs) and other such facilities at subsidised rates.Satyam was in the process of setting up three IT SEZs in the state apart from its existing 120 acre campus on the outskirts of the city at Bahadurpally.

"It's very difficult to quantify the land in the possession of these barons. While just a portion of it is allotted by the government, the rest is acquired by them privately. Even that is either through general power of attorney agreements or benami. Land allotments in this state are a big scam and no probe will be ever able to bring the perpetrators to the book," said a Hyderabad-based major property dealer.

Every time a new project has been taken up in the state land prices have shot up without fail in the vicinity even before the projects were awarded be it the Outer Ring Road (ORR), the Hyderabad Metro Rail Project or even the much touted Fabcity and the Hyderabad International Airport project built by GMR group.

Clearly, the new landed gentry in Andhra Pradesh are the industrial tsars and not necessarily the traditional zamindars anymore.
DNA

[G.Subramaniam]

Savithri PLEASE STOP POSTING ON THIS THREAD

YOU ARE A TROLL

As I have posted earlier
This thread is not about normal corrupt businessmen

but rather Strategic moves by people like Anil Ambani
to screw hindus

[Guest]

GS: There's seems to be a disconnect between thread title and what you intend this thread to be. You can make it a bit more clearer and all the Satyam stuff can moved elsewhere. If the thread title suggests that it's about 'Lack Of Conscience Of Business Leaders' then Raju of Satyam is the postor boy today.

[G.Subramaniam]

<!--QuoteBegin-Viren+Jan 22 2009, 07:53 AM-->QUOTE(Viren @ Jan 22 2009, 07:53 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->GS: There's seems to be a disconnect between thread title and what you intend this thread to be. You can make it a bit more clearer and all the Satyam stuff can moved elsewhere. If the thread title suggests that it's about 'Lack Of Conscience Of Business Leaders' then Raju of Satyam is the postor boy today.
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Most businessmen have to be somewhat corrupt in India, just to survive
and that is the normal cost of doing business

However, there is a subset of Hindu businessmen, who go above and beyond
normal corruption and deal with Dawood, Ford Foundation, etc
and this needs a focused thread, not general purpose posts

Satyam needs to on a thread called Satyam
I am sure there will be hundreds of posts on Satyam
Whereas, I am looking for just a few dozen high impact posts

G.S

[Guest]

No problem G.Subji. I can stay away.

[Guest]

GS: Recently Anil Ambani and Mittal endorsed Modi for PM. Any opinion as to why - I'm not asking in a cheeky manner, I'd really like to know the dynamics behind this if you have any info. Nothing of value I can find online.

[G.Subramaniam]

<!--QuoteBegin-Viren+Jan 24 2009, 06:42 PM-->QUOTE(Viren @ Jan 24 2009, 06:42 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->GS: Recently Anil Ambani and Mittal endorsed Modi for PM. Any opinion as to why - I'm not asking in a cheeky manner, I'd really like to know the dynamics behind this if you have any info. Nothing of value I can find online.
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A simple but possibly incorrect answer is that they
see, Modi model as making more money for businessmen than sucking upto
Amar Singh