Page 17 - Bloomberg Businessweek July 2018

Bloomberg Businessweek
THE HEIST ISSUE
THE

FLAWED

DIAMANTAIRE Nneeded to rob $2 billion from a bank. He’s a short
irav Modi didn’t seem like the kind of person who

man, 47 years old and losing hair, the pocket square in his
jacket always arranged to fussy perfection. His daintiness
befitted a jeweler to the stars. Kate Winslet wore a Modi
bracelet and Modi earrings to the Oscars. Dakota Johnson
wore a similar set to the Golden Globes. Priyanka Chopra 55
gazed out of Modi advertisements. Naomi Watts attended
the opening, in 2015, of his emporium on Madison Avenue.
Christie’s once put his Golconda Lotus necklace on the
cover of its catalog and auctioned it for more than $3 mil-
lion. His stores—in Las Vegas, Macau, Singapore, Beijing,
London—were boutiques of bling, where white light
bounced off the arrayed gold and diamonds. He told
people he wanted 100 shops by 2025. Last year, Forbes
estimated his worth at $1.8 billion. A good casting director
would have marked him for the role of heistee, not heister.
Even the alleged crime, when it finally broke water in
February, appeared to swim against the current of Modi’s
glamorous life. The money had been taken from Punjab
National Bank in 1,213 grinding doses over seven years. It
was the biggest bank fraud in India’s history, and it came
robed in technical jargon: letters of undertaking and Swift
bypasses, margin money and “nostro” accounts, core
banking solutions and buyer’s credit facilities.
But these were just details. In conception, the scheme
Hollywood stars wore his diamonds to investigators described was classical, old- fashioned; it
the Oscars. Then he was accused of stealing relied on inside men, and probably on greasing palms,
billions from an Indian bank and certainly on dodging technology more than using it.
And it depended on the failure of the notoriously creaky
By Samanth Subramanian structures of governance for India’s 21 state-run banks.
Illustrations by Gaurab Thakali These behemoths, which account for two-thirds of the

July 2, 2018