Ketan Parekh, the persistent ghoul of Dalal Street

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Ketan Parekh was a serial entrepreneur of systemic rot. First penalized for his role in the 1992 securities scam, he resurfaced by the turn of the millennium with a personalized version of market manipulation that eventually bore his name.

To understand Parekh, one must look at him not merely as a fraudster but as a master operator who refined the crude, blustering circular trading of the past into a high-frequency, institutionalized machinery of deception. Born into a lineage of Mumbai stockbrokers, Parekh was groomed in the pits of the Bombay Stock Exchange. A chartered accountant by training, he began his career at NH Securities, his father’s firm, before migrating to the orbit of Harshad Mehta at GrowMore Research.

Where Mehta was the Big Bull who broke the bank with sheer bravado, Parekh was the understudy, soft-spoken, discreet, and devastatingly precise. Mehta eventually met his fate when the 1992 scam was uncovered, but if regulators believed they had closed the systemic loopholes of that era, they were mistaken. Parekh saw the episode as a blueprint for refinement.

This refusal to learn the correct lesson from a predecessor’s failure is a hallmark of the Successful Psychopath, a profile explored by Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare, the leading pioneers in the study of corporate psychopathy. In their seminal book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, Babiak and Hare note that such individuals view market regulations not as moral boundaries, but as intellectual puzzles to be solved.