In the end Jignesh Shah, promoter of Financial Technologies India Ltd and one of the most brilliant financial minds, ended up a victim of his own cleverness and an overriding ambition that comes close to greed. Or should one say cleverness by half because whilst he built a multi-crore empire of commodity, gold and equity exchanges in India, Dubai and Singapore, the underlying ethics and financial objectives were often not above board.
His downfall started almost two years ago when the government took action against the National Spot Exchange Ltd, which he founded and which was discovered to have defaulted on payouts of Rs 5,574 crore. Whilst Mr Shah’s involvement in NSEL was long suspected, the investigating authorities had no concrete proof. However the last straw was the explosive confession last week of former NSEL chief Anjani Sinha, who was arrested in October last year and who had earlier taken all the blame for the illegalities at the NSEL. Sinha finally spilled the beans last week, detailing the role of Mr Shah and his devious objective behind the setting up of the NSEL.
An electronics and telecommunications engineer who started his career with the Bombay SE, Mr Shah was supremely confident of facing what he had called a “tsunami” of problems. It was this kind of overconfidence throughout his meteoric rise that catapulted him to the zenith from where he fell. But, in the end, as an enormous risk-taker, he was always testing the limits of the law before it finally caught up with him.
