B.R. Shetty: The corporate Icarus whose vast empire sank into the UAE's sands

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Imagine Reinhold Messner reaching the summit of Everest only to look back at the trail of climbers behind him, and thinking: I’m going to go a little further. With that, he leaps off the top of the highest peak in the world into the vast, icy vacuum below.

As he whizzes past the Hillary Step, plummeting at terminal velocity, he shouts to the horrified onlookers: “So far, so good!" This is the story of Bavaguthu Raghuram Shetty and many other tycoons like him. It is a narrative so repetitive it almost defies retelling: Modest beginnings and entrepreneurial zeal leading to a vertical ascent of fame and fortune. But once at the top, the urge to grab one more billion or one more trophy asset becomes a compulsion.

What follows is the inevitable fall, followed by the worms creeping out, revealing the rot within. And always, in the aftermath, there is the regret of what might have been had the protagonist stuck to the right path. Shetty’s story is a perfect example.

Born in 1942 in Udupi to a father who was a politician and freedom fighter, the young man failed to secure a stable government job despite his pharmaceutical studies at the Manipal College of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Desperate for work and drowning in debt from his sister’s wedding, he left for Abu Dhabi in 1973 with little more than eight dirhams and oodles of ambition. From those humble beginnings, he worked hard and smart to set himself up as the UAE’s first outdoor medical representative in a land just beginning to smell of opportunity.

By 1975, he opened New Medical Centre (NMC), a small local clinic where his wife, Dr. Chandrakumari, was the only physician. Shetty had seen what others didn’t: A massive expatriate workforce