INFLUENTIAL BANDITS

Audacious crimes of Rana Kapoor who’s duped Yes Bank of tens of thousands of crores are out in the open and investigation by all agencies are in full flow.

All those who are involved in these crimes, either by their direct participation or by their collusion through negligence, whether deliberate or otherwise are being questioned and cases are being registered. Those being interrogated at present by the agencies are those persons who executed these crimes of giving reckless and corrupt loans and also those who benefitted from such dubious lending. The executioners include Rana Kapoor and his top teammates at Yes Bank ie. its top executives, as also the silent/mute auditors and directors of Yes Bank who made it possible to loot the bank. The complicit role of KPMG the auditors of Yes Bank is already under investigation. The others being questioned by the ED and the CBI at present are the beneficiaries of such corrupt lending ie. the unworthy favoured borrowers to whom large loans were frivolously doled out by Rana Kapoor. Their questioning has begun one after the other and cases are being registered.

The CBI has already lodged an FIR against Rana Kapoor and the DHFL promoter Mr Kapil Wadhwan, for the alleged bribes of Rs.600 crores that he took, for grant of bad loans of Rs.4450 crores to DHFL. The CBI has further registered a criminal case against Rana Kapoor and Gautam Thapar the shady promoter of the Avantha Group, to whom easy loans of Rs.1900 crores were given by the bank and were allowed to turn bad and irrecoverable, in lieu of sale of a Delhi bungalow of Gautam Thapar worth Rs.695 crores for mere Rs.385 crores, to Rana Kapoor’s wife, resulting in a gain of over Rs.300 crores to the Kapoor family. Rana Kapoor made illicit gains of over Rs.300 crores in this case, while the bank lost almost Rs.2000 crores in the loans given to the Avantha Group. Similarly, the promoter of the Mumbai based real estate group Radius, Sanjay Chabbria is being questioned for illegal loans of Rs.1200 crores that were given and when they turned bad, fresh loans were given in order to repay the old loans, to green the account and hide the reality. The ED has now summoned Anil Ambani for the questionable loans given to his group by Yes Bank and the others who will soon be similarly questioned and maybe charge-sheeted, will be the promoters of Jet Airways, Essel Group, Cox & Kings, Videocon and CG Power.

The modus operandi of this duping of Yes Bank for thousands of crores in now very clear and is like many others that we have witnessed in the case of ILFS, PMC Bank, DHFL etc. ie Loans for bribes which happened in the case of loans given to DHFL by Yes Bank, settlement of bad/dubious loans given/settled between Yes Bank and the Avantha Group, siphoning off funds through related party transactions which Rana Kapoor did it through DoIT Urban Ventures a company owned by his daughters and 79 other entities they owned, greening of bad loans as in the case of the Radius group and many others, irresponsible lending only to increased his personal network and clout and finally falsification of financial statements. With Rana Kapoor allegedly having made Rs.4300 crores in bribes, as per the CBI, this is the tip of the iceberg.

And since this loot of the bank involved the most influential persons of Indian society and business, it was audacious and blatant, as is evident from its following features.

• Blatant and audacious criminality.
• These illegal loans were not deep layered, deep-rooted or sophisticated in design. They were visible low hanging fruit on the surface, which could have been easily detected/prevented if the auditors/directors and the regulator wanted to.
• Since these were visible on the very surface, the accounts of Yes Bank were grossly fudged to hide the reality, which explains the variance in the actual NPAs and the disclosed NPAs of the bank.
• All possible laws were thus violated whether it was the Companies Act, Banking Act, RBI Regulations, Income Tax, PMLA, Benami etc. That explains the absence of any regulatory compliance culture at Yes Bank, as was noted in the RBI inspection reports.
• All those who could have prevented the crimes actively colluded in the crime.
• The perpetrators of the crime and the beneficiaries thereof were the most influential persons, who certainly thought that they manned the system, so they can game it too.

The frauds committed in ILFS, PMC Bank, DHFL etc. were of similar audacity, because they took the system for granted, due to their sheer clout and networking with the powers that be. These are all influential bandits.