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

of history as one of the biggest banking failures in India—whether it was intentional or not is what we will unravel through the course of this book.

Rana formed a trio while there—with his brother-in-law Ashok Kapur and another gentleman, Harkirat Singh, whom he went on to betray after YES Bank was established. How? Read on to know.

In February 1995, a team from Rabobank arrived in India, scouting for opportunities in the country’s expanding financial services market. Rabobank is a Dutch multinational bank and financial services company that saw a huge opportunity in the Indian market post the liberalization of the economy. Ashok Kapur came to know of this and informed Rana. Kapoor, his brother-in-law Ashok, and Harkirat Singh made a proposal to the visiting team for two joint ventures: a non-banking financial company and a bank. During the next year, Kapoor held meetings with Rabobank executives in India, Singapore and the Netherlands—laying the foundations for Rabobank, which would ultimately become the foundation for YES Bank.

It was not only the idea of starting his own bank that got materialized during his stint at Grindlays, but he also worked for Jet Airways’ Naresh Goyal—the man who would later become one of the biggest defaulters of YES Bank. He helped Jet Airways raise funds for its fleet acquisition in the latter half of the 1990s.

This was not his only big-ticket deal in Grindlays. The other one was helping Sunil Bharti Mittal of Airtel roll out cellular services in Delhi. Over the years, in the course of his public interactions, he has been flaunting about knowing Mittal for almost four decades now. He, by his own admission, used to play snooker at the Panchshila Club in south Delhi—one of the posh areas of the national capital —since both of them were sixteen. Even when Rana built an empire based in Mumbai, the city of Delhi remained alive in heart, at least that is what his alleged real-estate transactions indicate, which are detailed in the the ED chargesheet and talked about in the later chapters.

As irony would have it a deal in Delhi was probably the start of his downfall, which culminated in India’s biggest banking failure and his ultimate arrest.

At Bank of America, though he was an important cog in the wheel, he was away from the limelight. But at Grindlays he started to dream ‘big’, a lesson he had probably learnt from his first boss, Vikram Talwar. ‘It widened my perspective in corporate finance and investment banking, and involved considerable organisational, team and client development processes and the institutionalisation of the same,’ Rana said in his 2003 interview with Financial Express.2

But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t working on his public relations during his time at Bank of America. His contemporaries were all high-flyers who had made a big name for themselves in the industry: Jaspal Singh Bindra, the executive chairman of Centrum Group (he was also the former group executive director and CEO for Asia at Standard Chartered Bank, or StanChart); V Shankar, now CEO of private equity (PE) firm Gateway Partners and former CEO of StanChart’s Middle East, Africa and Americas business; and Vishwavir Ahuja, the reticent managing director and CEO of RBL Bank (he was also Rana’s boss at Bank of America for a decade, a post Rana wanted to hold). But still Rana outshone them, all thanks to his PR skills. His image in the media was helped by two factors back then. He was among the first bankers to hire a PR team for himself, while he was still at Bank of America. Secondly, back then, unlike today, there were very few journalists who covered foreign banks. This gave him an added leverage of building a personal connect with those journalists.

Rana Kapoor, through the accounts of the people who knew him, and as detailed in this book, was perceived as a shrewd, manipulative, aggressive and arrogant man. He was also considered flamboyant by the people whom I interviewed during the course of researching for this book.

But for all his negative traits, Rana, in our interactions, came out to be a family man—a man who could go to any extent for his immediate family, a man who gave it all for his family.

However, his love for his family was peculiar. Whatever he did, it was to secure the future of his daughters. But like at office, he was aggressive at home too. It was more like my way or the highway.

Towards the end of 2012, Rana’s middle daughter—Rakhee Kapoor Tandon—was getting married. It was her sangeet ceremony. It was around 2 a.m. and most of the guests had called it a day. Exhausted, Rana’s wife, Bindu Kapoor, was resting in the sitting room. The three daughters, their cousins and friends were enjoying some drinks and dancing as was one of his daughters. Rana grew uncomfortable because of this. He walked up to Radha, took her to the side and slapped her hard, one of the people present at that function told me. The slap, in front of the other girls, was so hard that Radha’s earring fell off, the same person added. It was only after the girls got Bindu to intervene did the situation de-escalate.

Yet, years later, in 2020, Rana would do everything from jail just to ensure that no harm befell his daughters.

This was Rana Kapoor as a family man for you: loving, yet aggressive. At office, he was always seen as a cunning, ruthless and manipulative person, according to several of his co-workers who I have interacted with. As per one of his employees, he was a ‘maverick banker’.

Such has been Rana’s aggression in his race to the top that while I interviewed dozens of people who seem to have suffered at his hands, none among them was willing to go on record against him. Rana had established his reign on the basis of fear psychosis.

Here, let me give you trivial information. Rana was so self-obsessed that he wanted the number nine in everything: his office at