[1998] The Polyester Prince by Hamish McDonald

Author:Hamish McDonald
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biography
ISBN: 9781864484687
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 1998-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

10

SLEUTHS

To see Bhure Lal on his evening walk around New Delhi’s Lodhi Gardens was to know at once a man not easily diverted from his objective. Military-style moustache always neat, eyes narrowed on some distant point ahead, arms swinging, Bhure Lal attacked his exercise routine with the intensity of a soldier on a desperate forced march to lift a siege. Friends among the senior bureaucrats who favoured the Lodhi circuit struggled to keep up with his blistering pace.

The military bearing was no affectation. Bhure Lal had joined the Indian Army on a short-term officer’s commission soon after the Chinese attack along the eastern borders in 1962, and saw action against Pakistan in the 1965 war. He retired from military service with the rank of captain in 1970 when he won a place through examination in the elite Indian Administrative Service. After several district posts in Uttar Pradesh, he became a secretary to V. P. Singh when he was the state’s chief minister. At the end of March 1985, just after Singh as Rajiv’s finance minister had declared his war on the black economy, Bhure Lal was made Director of Enforcement in the Ministry of Finance, responsible for finding transgressions of India’s highly detailed and restrictive exchange control laws. By early 1986 he too had joined the attack on Dhirubhai.

The Director of Enforcement enjoyed wide discretionary powers about whom he investigated, and was allowed to operate with minimal circulation of reports outside his own office to avoid compromising arrests and search raids. In addition, Bhure Lal had the confidence of his immediate superior, the Revenue Secretary in the Ministry of Finance, Vinod Pande, who in turn was a confidant of V. P. Singh himself. It was a closed circle that frustrated Dhirubhai’s network of sympathetic officials within the Finance Ministry, among whom many fellow bureaucrats and politicians placed the able and ambitious head of the ministry, the Finance Secretary, S. Venkitaramanan.1

Bhure Lal made his first foray overseas to pick up Dhirubhai’s hidden financial trails in May 1986. He went to London to look into the ownership of the Isle of Man companies, but found a baffling wall of secrecy in the tax havens. He travelled to Leicester in an attempt to persuade the Shahs to talk, but arrived a few days after the family head, Krishna Kant Shah, had died. His attempt to prosecute the Kirloskar group over its alleged front company in Germany had also failed because the suspect company’s financial statements could not be sequestered.

The Enforcement Directorate also raided the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in Bombay, and brought charges against its local general manager and five other staff under the special law against smuggling of currency, which went by the acronym COFEPOSA. Bhure Lal met the head of the BCCI’s Asian operations, Swaleh Naqvi, and offered to go soft on the bank’s staff provided it supplied all details of Dhirubhai’s suspected transactions to fund the purchase of Reliance shares by the offshore companies. Naqvi agreed, but reneged

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