Harshad Shantilal Mehta was an Indian stockbroker and a convicted fraudster.
16 Facts About Harshad Mehta
2.
Harshad Mehta was convicted by the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court of India for his part in a financial scandal valued at 100 billion which took place on the Bombay Stock Exchange.
3.
Harshad Mehta was on trial for 9 years, until he died at the end of 2001 from a heart attack.
4.
Harshad Shantilal Mehta was born on 29 July 1954, at Paneli Moti, Rajkot district, in a Gujarati Jain family.
5.
Harshad Mehta's early childhood was spent in Borivali, where his father was a small-time textile businessman.
6.
Harshad Mehta did his early study in Janta Public School, Camp 2 Bhilai.
7.
Harshad Mehta started his career as a sales person in the Mumbai office of New India Assurance Company Limited.
8.
Harshad Mehta justified this excessive trading in ACC shares by stating that the stock had been undervalued, and that the market had simply corrected when it revalued the company at a price equivalent to the cost of building a similar enterprise; the so-called "replacement cost theory" that he had put forward.
9.
Harshad Mehta was covered in a cover page article of a number of publications including the popular economic magazine Business Today, in an article titled "Raging Bull".
10.
Harshad Mehta cleverly squeezed capital out of the banking system to address this requirement of banks and pumped this money into the share market.
11.
Harshad Mehta promised the banks higher rates of interest, while asking them to transfer the money into his personal account, under the guise of buying securities for them from other banks.
12.
Harshad Mehta used this money temporarily in his account to buy shares, thus hiking up demand of certain shares dramatically, selling them off, passing on a part of the proceeds to the bank and kept the rest for himself.
13.
Once these fake BRs were issued, they were passed on to other banks and the banks in turn gave money to Harshad Mehta, plainly assuming that they were lending against government securities when this was not really the case.
14.
Harshad Mehta was dipping illegally into the banking system to finance his buying.
15.
Harshad Mehta used forged BRs to gain unsecured loans, and used several small banks to issue BRs on demand.
16.
Once these fake BRs were issued, they were passed on to other banks and the banks in turn gave money to Harshad Mehta, mistakenly believing that they were lending against government securities.