The windscreen of the Mercedes parked beneath the building was blown to smithereens, and the roof caved in to kiss the leather of the seat as Tanuja’s body crashed onto it with a big thud. Colleagues and others standing nearby rushed towards the Merc, but were only able to pull the lifeless and limp body of Tanuja out from the car.
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The Times of India
2nd February 2012
The headline of The Times of India next day was a very poignant one: ‘Father–Daughter duo meet tragic end in money laundering scam.’
In a startling turn of events, two people died under tragic circumstances. Tanuja, the Head of Human Resources at a global bank, jumped from the terrace of the bank building at MG road in the busy Fort area of Mumbai. She is alleged to have been one of the key perpetrators of a massive money-laundering scam spread across the country. In an operation, which lasted till late in the night, the Central Bureau of Investigation, acting under specific instructions from the Government of India, and in tandem with Greater Boston Global Bank, arrested Zinaida Gomes, the Bandra-based relationship manager and twelve other relationship managers of the bank, from their residences.
In what seems to be linked to the money-laundering scam, the bank has fired its Head of Retail Banking, Vikram Bahl, even though the bank claims that it was on account of some irregularities and misappropriation of bank funds. Bahl too has been taken into custody by the CBI.
In Devikulam Kerala, the Trikakulam Nuclear Power Plant (TNPP) protests took a really ugly turn when, around the same time as Tanuja’s death, Jayakumar, one of the founders of CNRI, an NGO supporting the anti-TNPP movement, was shot dead by 75-year-old Krishna Menon, using his licensed revolver at his resort about ten kilometres from TNPP.
It might be worth noting that Krishna Menon had gone public with his allegations against Jayakumar being an arms lobbyist and having access to dirty money, in a television interview only a day earlier. This had soured the relationships between the two and had led to a power struggle based on who would champion the movement.
Addressing assembled reporters outside the Devikulam police station, Krishna Menon said that his conscience was clear and that what he had done was to make sure that the anti-TNPP struggle remains a struggle of the people of the region and that too for genuine reasons. Krishna added that people like Jayakumar were manipulating the locals for their own gains and on behalf of certain foreign forces and nations opposed to the TNPP.
What lends credibility to the claims of Krishna Menon is the fact that Tanuja, the foreign bank’s HR head, involved in the same money laundering scandal, is the youngest daughter of Jayakumar.
A red-corner notice has been issued by the Interpol for the arrest of Abhishek Mathur, Tanuja’s husband, whose whereabouts are unknown. A search of Abhishek and Tanuja’s residence revealed that Abhishek used different names and identities to travel out of the country. Multiple passports in the names of Joseph Braganza, Mir Zawawi and Suresh Ramamurthy were recovered from the Mathurs’ residence. Visiting cards in the name of Abhishek Mathur, McKinsey Consultants were also recovered. McKinsey has denied that anyone by that name ever worked there. Raw uncut diamonds valued at over twenty-two crore were also recovered from the Mathur residence leading one to believe that the Mathurs were a part of a larger global money laundering syndicate. (Detailed report on page four.)
This tale brings into focus the changing aspirations of urban India, and the saga of greed which prevails in most corporates in India, where morally bankrupt managers are willing to go to any extent to fulfil their materialistic desires. Has the end become more important than the means? (Detailed report on page three.)
Karan was sitting at home that morning, reading the morning edition of The Times of India. He had just returned from work a few hours ago. It had been very difficult for him to convince Andy and Bhaskar that their cover story should not be derogatory of GB2 or its management. Hadn’t he given his word to Indrani? Kavya walked into the dining room—she had just woken up. It was the first time she had stayed back with him for the night. Karan disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared in three minutes with a cup of freshly brewed filter coffee and placed it delicately in front of her on the table.
Kavya smiled. ‘If you promise to make me a cup of coffee every morning, then I might consider allowing you to meet my parents.’ Karan smiled and hugged her. ‘I don’t need to meet your parents sweetheart. As long as you are there to savour it, it’s in my own interest to brew it for you,’ he winked.
EPILOGUE
The Next Nine Months
Vikram Bahl had to face intense media and legal scrutiny for his alleged involvement in the money laundering scam. After six months of trial by media, which was quick to pronounce him guilty, the courts found no evidence against him and he was acquitted. But the stigma of his association with Tanuja and his brashly corrupt practices became the talk of an industry where trust and integrity were increasingly being seen as the most important personality traits. No financial services firm was willing to hire him. He had to give up his banking career and now relies on his wife’s fledgling business as a painter. His career as a banker was doomed the day Tanuja found in him an able ally and more so the day he had met Chandrasekhar at a party at Tanuja’s house.
Indrani, the only CEO to have ever had the courage to allow someone from the media investigate an internal scam, was initially touted as a hero, a leader with a vision, as someone who had the courage to take an unprecedented step in corporate history. However, it was not lost on the organization that she had committed a cardinal sin in breaching customer confidentiality and passed on detailed customer and employee information to someone who was not authorised to have access to them. Some would argue that she was left with no other choice. Had she not done what she did, she faced the prospect of GB2 being hauled over coals by the same media which had ended up praising her after the revelations. It could even have been accused of being an accomplice in money laundering. That could have been disastrous for GB2’s brand image. A few CEOs, in private, even acknowledged the fact that they too might have done what Indrani did. This argument, however, didn’t cut ice with the board of GB2, which in a sweeping gesture, banished her to Mauritius to handle GB2’s miniscule operations there, in what was largely seen as a punishment posting. However, given her resilience and the goodwill she enjoyed, she is expected to bounce back strongly in the coming years.
A badly mutilated body of an Indian, said to be Abhishek Mathur was found in a hotel in Israel. It is suspected that after the exposé related to the involvement of the German and American nuclear agencies and the CIA in the laundering of money, which made its way to the TNPP protests, he was disavowed by the agencies backing him. It was widely speculated that in order to prevent any damage to their reputation resulting from any leakage of information—had Abhishek Mathur been taken into custody, he might have been taken out by the very same agencies that he worked for. Though not many know that moments before he died, armed with revelations of an injured David Kosinski, a tactical team of the Vienna police had clandestinely raided the hotel and knocked on the doors of the room in which an unsuspecting Abhishek Mathur was holed up.
Mumbai police reclassified the Raymond Saldanah suicide case as a homicide and began investigations into the murder of the compliance head. Not much is expected to come of it as the brains behind the murder were already dead.
The TNPP protests continued as usual. With Krishna Menon in jail for the killing of Jayakumar, his wife Sulochana is leading the battle for the citizen’s rights. Though she is not expected to win the battle, and TNPP is closer to commissioning than it ever was, the events that took place in the cusp of January and February surely turned the attention of the local and international media on the quaint town of Devikulam in the Western Ghats. It forced the government to come clean on a number of issues related to the site selection and rehabilitation, which was what Krishna Menon was fighting for in the first place.
Johann Schr
oeder took over as the President of Vienna Police in five months. No one ever got to know about the covert operation in Israel, which Karlis Simanis, on explicit instructions from Schroeder had staged. Johann Schroeder had, at the last minute, changed his mind about passing on the information about Joseph Braganza aka Abhishek Mathur to Interpol and the Israeli police, when he had seen the images which had been mailed to him by Karan Panjabi, who had got his email id from the Vienna Police’s press releases. Karlis Simanis was rewarded for his loyalty to Schroeder and made the Deputy Head of Vienna Police, in line to succeed Schroeder in three years—the second consecutive time that someone from the forensics team had made it to that post.
Karan and Kavya got married within the next three months. Karan quit the media and moved back to GB2 as the Head of Retail Banking. There was little he could do when the board of GB2, under specific joint recommendation from Ronald McCain, the erstwhile CEO of Indian operations and Indrani, had insisted on his return. The money was just too good to refuse. Karan diligently went about strengthening GB2’s retail franchise in India. The first thing he had to rebuild was in fact, the most difficult—the trust that GB2’s employees, customer and regulators had on the bank. And there was no one else who was more equipped to handle this task than him.
Table of Contents
Book Information
Copyrights
Dedication Page
PROLOGUE
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EPILOGUE
Back Cover
The Bankster (Ravi Subramanian) Page 32
