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

Pvt. Ltd — a company of the DHFL group controlled by Dheeraj Wadhawan and Kapil Wadhawan — for slum rehabilitation. It was sanctioned on 18 June 2018 by the Management Credit Committee headed by Rana Kapoor, despite internal red flags, it was alleged.3 The chain that the ED has highlighted has allegations of both round-tripping and evergreening again.

It goes like this: YES Bank took Rs 118 crore as processing fee and the GST on that amount. The remaining Rs 632 crore was transferred to Belief Realtors. Belief Realtors immediately transferred the money to KYTA Advisors Pvt. Ltd, who then transferred the full amount to RIP Developers Pvt. Ltd. From there the money was transferred to DHFL and not used for sanctioned purpose. As much as Rs 450 crore was granted as loan to two different entities, who used it to repay their existing borrowings from YES Bank, in an alleged round-tripping and evergreening case. How would such a transaction help YES Bank? Since YES Bank got an upfront payment of Rs 118 crore, it showed this as profit and Rs 450 crore as loan repayment by granting a new loan of Rs 750 crore, which the bank didn’t show as a bad loan as well. All such bad loans came to the fore when the clean-up was initiated.

A special court extended the ED custody of Rana Kapoor till 20 March. He’d been arrested under provisions of the Prevention of Money laundering Act (PMLA) as he was allegedly being uncooperative with the probe. In the chargesheet, it has been reported that the investigating agency is learnt to have given the details of about 170 bank accounts used to siphon off kickbacks. Further, it has explained the role of about 112 shell companies in India and abroad, created solely to launder money by the Kapoor family. The chargesheet also talked of how the family bought properties out of the kickbacks it received from the companies whose loans were disbursed by the bank on Rana Kapoor’s instructions. So far, the agency has identified assets both in India and abroad belonging to the Kapoor family. The properties overseas include two luxury hotels—one in New York (worth over $20 million) and one in London (£30 million). This is not all. The family also has two residential apartments in London, valued at £15 million each, and a yacht in the UK.

Rana Kapoor’s six bungalows in Delhi’s upscale localities, including the ones in Jor Bagh, Hauz Khas and on Kautilya Marg, have also been identified. One of these, it was reported, was bought from fugitive offender Vijay Mallya. So have six flats and land in Mumbai and its suburban areas. The agency will start attaching them after the lockdown is over.

The CBI has booked Rana Kapoor for allegedly accepting a over Rs 307-crore bribe in the form of a Lutyens’ zone bungalow from a realty firm to go easy on bank loans amounting to around Rs 1900 crore to the seller’s group companies — Gautam Thapar and Avantha Reality.

Bliss Abode Pvt. Ltd is a privately held company, in which the directors are Bindu Rana Kapoor and Ajita Madhukar Potdar. Interestingly, Ajita is a co-director with Bindu Rana Kapoor in sixteen companies. The only place where Ajita isn’t co-director with Bindu Rana Kapoor is DoIT E-Solutions (India) Limited, where Bindu Rana Kapoor and Radha Kapoor Khanna are the co-directors.

Who is Ajita Madhukar Potdar, who Rana Kapoor’s wife trusted so much? On the face of it, Ajita was one of the trusted employees of yet another company controlled by the family, DoIT Urban Infranetwork Pvt. Ltd, where one of the three directors is Alkesh Tandon — the husband of Rana Kapoor’s second daughter, Rakhee Kapoor Tandon. Ajita is also the daughter of late Sheila Kapoor’s (Rana Kapoor’s mother) best friend. That is where all the trust came from. DoIT Urban Infranetwork Pvt. Ltd is the subsidiary of Morgan Credits Private Limited — a part of the erstwhile promoter group in YES Bank. Rana Kapoor himself is said to have trusted only one person outside his family — his personal secretary Lata Dave.

Bliss Abode spend Rs 378 crore to buy 40, Amrita Shergill Marg in New Delhi, the family home of industrialist Gautam Thapar in September 2017. The property was mortgaged to YES Bank before it was purchased by Bliss Abode. ‘The transaction raises questions about corporate governance practices at the bank, and whether a very close relative of the chief executive of the bank should be buying a property that has been offered as collateral to the lender,’ journalist Varun Sood, who researched the deal for two months, wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Interestingly, the charge on the property was released by the bank to facilitate the deal between Bliss Abode and the Thapar family, based on the understanding that the money raised will be used to pay an existing loan, the Sood’s post said. Gautam Thapar’s Avantha Realty mortgaged his bungalow, built over a nearly 6000-square-yard area, in March 2016 to YES Bank. Business tycoon Sunil Bharti Mittal, who Rana claimed was one of his childhood friends, is just one of the residents of this row of homes that houses billionaires. Avantha Realty, the privately owned firm which owned the property, had borrowed Rs 400 crore at an 11 per cent interest.

‘The bank’s in-house experts had valued the property at Rs 330 crore. Six months later, in October 2016, property consultants Cushman & Wakefield, hired by YES Bank, put a market value of Rs 357 crore [on it]. In June 2017, Thapar expressed interest to sell this property and asked YES Bank to remove the charge on the property. The bank removed the charge, claiming that it is normal practice. Three months later, in August 2017, Rahul Bhatia, the owner of IndiGo airlines, expressed interest to buy the property for Rs 375 crore. For some reason, the deal fell through. Finally, towards the end of August, Bliss Abode emerged as the winner when it agreed to pay Rs 378