The Banker Who Crushed His Diamonds by Furquan Moharkan (read novel full txt) 📕

disrepute the bank and its MD & CEO without any checks and balances. The pattern/sequel of articles published by Business Standard in the last two+ months would clearly indicate that there is explicit malice and prejudice, which the journalist(s) of Business Standard are trying to demonstrate. Probably they are doing it at the behest of our competitors (also given the inherent conflict of interest given the common Promoter ownership of Business Standard and Kotak Mahindra Bank) or market manipulators, which only an internal investigation by Business Standard would reveal the extra-motivation received by such journalist(s),’ YES Bank’s General Counsel Sanjay Nambiar wrote in a letter dated 4 December 2018, addressed to the editors of Business Standard—A.K. Bhattacharya and Shyamal Majumdar.

Replying to the bank within three days, Majumdar rejected the charge, ‘especially since no factual errors have been pointed out by the bank’. ‘Most of the reports alluded to are of a routine nature, relating to press releases and other announcements by regulators, credit rating agencies or the bank itself. Wherever required, the paper’s reporters have taken the bank’s point of view,’ the newspaper said.

Many business journalists at that point in time, who had an idea about Rana’s misdeeds, were flabbergasted with the approach. Many thought it was a one-off event arising out of desperation. But even as Rana left the bank, the legacy remained. And over the next one year, as the bank started to tumble, its marketing team started blaming everyone other than its own management.

In fact, as soon as a journalist did a negative story on YES Bank, a bunch of anonymous Twitter accounts would jump in and troll the journalists—the prominent among these were the handles Stock Ki Baat and Himanshu Kumar. When I broke the story about the bank’s end on 20 September 2019, Himanshu Kumar tweeted to me: ‘Oh! This was unfortunate that Yes Bank didn’t reached Kotak Bank. And Kotak Bank said “NO” to Yes Bank is DayDream. I know you are follower of Uday Kotak sir. Why you are not following @RanaKapoor_? (sic.)’ I don’t know where this came from, as I haven’t ever met Uday Kotak, but this tweet seemed to be in sync with the bank’s year-old strategy to blame Uday Kotak.

ENTER RAVNEET GILL

By December-end, the bank had tried interviewing many people but was not able to hire anyone. It was on 26 December 2018 that the committee tasked with finding Rana Kapoor’s successor called up Ravneet Gill. The first contact was established.

Within eight days, on 5 January 2019, Ravneet Gill was interviewed for the first time. On 8 January, there was a second round of interviews and YES Bank had found its new CEO, subject to the RBI’s approval. The RBI okayed the appointment on 23 January 2019.

Rana Kapoor wasn’t part of any of the panels that interviewed Ravneet Gill. But Ravneet had met Rana separately to know the details about the bank. At this meeting, Rana, who still wanted to directly control the bank, asked Ravneet to make him the adviser. But Ravneet was clear, he didn’t want any interference in running the bank. ‘I will only come on board if I am not made the puppet face,’ Ravneet told Rana. And that is where Rana gave up his demand of being directly associated with the bank — at least in front of Ravneet.

On 1 March 2019, Ravneet Gill, the former boss of the Deutsche Bank in India, joined YES Bank. The markets welcomed him with caution — the shares of the bank, which were battered by 29 per cent by then, went up by 3 per cent on the day he joined. Life was coming a full circle here. YES Bank was going to be headed by a man whose top boss at Deutsche Bank had been Harkirat Singh — the man who had actually decided to start the bank that would ultimately be named YES Bank. Although Harkirat had no role in Ravneet’s hiring in 1991, Ravneet knew him as his CEO, despite not directly reporting to him.

Now, the interesting part of the story lies in the fact that Ravneet, just like his predecessor Rana Kapoor, used to flaunt his connections with the who’s who of Indian banking. The son of a former Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officer, he grew up in Delhi’s upscale neighbourhood of Moti Bagh — considered to be a part of Lutyens’ Delhi. He had an interesting neighbour there whom he used to play cricket with — memories with whom he would flaunt years later. This was senior intelligence officer R. Govindarajan, one of whose sons, Raghuram Rajan, went on to become a celebrity-styled RBI chief years later in 2014. It was this memory that Ravneet used to talk about everywhere. ‘We were next-door neighbours for many years. We used to play tennis, ball, cricket every evening. One day he got me out and went on a celebratory run! This was at Moti Bagh in Delhi,’ he said in one of the interviews with Economic Times.1 He also claimed to be mentored by many industry stalwarts, including Anshu Jain, his former boss, among others. But why is Jain important to our story? Well, we will come to know in due course.

Ravneet had his task cut out: to salvage the bank from the mess its founder and then promoter Rana Kapoor had put it in. Many, including some journalists, started predicting how Ravneet was going to save the bank. But that was not to be, as he essentially ended up making the mess messier.

In his first result announcement, a little less than two months after taking charge of the bank, YES Bank reported a maiden loss of Rs 1500 crore — mostly on the back of an increase in the provision for bad loans. ‘Gross slippages of Rs 3481 crores in Q4FY19, of which Rs 552 crore was on account of an airline company exposure that was performing as on 31 March 2019 and Rs 529 crore on account of