Remember the notorious Rajkumar Basantani of Soundcraft Industries, Adam Comsoft and Kolar Biotech who fled after duping investors and banks of a few hundred crores? The three companies managed to siphon over Rs200 crore from 30 banks that lent him money including Punjab National Bank (Rs11.5 crore), Bharat Overseas Bank (Rs five crore) and Greater Bombay Co-operative Bank (Rs five crore). In...

There is a flip side to the Basantani story as well. In the credit card business, issuers were forced to find a solution to the problem of wilful defaulters and fraudsters. With the help of MasterCard, they created a defaulters’ list (popularly known as the Satyam List, since it was hosted by that company) to weed out bad borrowers. The regulator reacted much later by encouraging the growth of...

Some of our Momentum stocks have gone up hugely last fortnight with the market rally. We are making seven changes to the list

Gainers
The market briefly celebrated two key positive developments; softening crude prices and an end to the political uncertainty with the Congress-led alliance. Stocks in our momentum list did fairly well with an average 4% rise over the fortnight. The market...