The unravelling of a financial titan: Ravi Parthasarathy and the IL&FS scandal

livemint.com:

₹90,000 crore. To put that in perspective Vijay Mallya, who was accused of fraud and money laundering, owes Indian banks ₹9,000 crore. Another high-profile accused Jet Airways founder Naresh Goyal owes about ₹7,000 crore to various banks.

Parthasarathy, by contrast, hasn’t copped as much of the blame despite the fact that Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS), the non-banking financial institution (NBFC) he had joined as president and CEO in 1987, would by 2017 become a byword for financial skulduggery of a scale rarely seen before or since. Promoted by the Central Bank of India along with UTI and HDFC, IL&FS had auspicious beginnings as a trendsetter of the public-private partnership (PPP) model, with Parthasarathy as its principal driver. By then, the IIM Ahmedabad alumnus and former Citibanker had already cemented his reputation as an entrepreneur, having co-founded 20th Century Finance.

It was one of his many skills. Networking was another. Shrewdly, he brought in senior bureaucrats to head the dozens of special purpose vehicles through which IL&FS executed various projects and, of course, concealed its real financials.

By the early 2000s, the company was the go-to organization for governments at the Centre and in the states. Roads, ports, power, water, environmental infrastructure, nothing was beyond the scope of IL&FS’s capabilities. In a delicious bit of irony, when Satyam Computers collapsed following its own ₹15,000 crore scam, the government turned to IL&FS to bail out Maytas Infra, the real estate group that was at the root of the IT company’s woes.