It is not difficult to imagine the stockmarket as a cricket field. There are batsmen, bowlers, umpires, support staff, administrators and the media. Some might even think of it as a regulated sport. There are rules, punishments and established processes for redressal of complaints, etc.
When you talk of cricket, it is not possible not to think of the recent tragedy of the demise of promising Aussie cricketer Phil Hughes. Now, imagine Sean Abbott, whose fatal bouncer claimed Hughes' life, being charged with murder or homicide.
Lodged in a prison outside the capital, Nitin Mangal, a young chartered accountant (CA), is finding himself in such a nightmarish situation. Agreed, he bowled a bouncer, which might have caused considerable hurt to the batsman. But does that make him guilty of criminal conspiracy to intimidate and extort?
What did Mangal do?
Mangal was assisting a Canada-based investment firm, Veritas Corporation as a consultant (not even a fulltime employee). "Nitin (Mangal) is in charge of fact-finding and data integrity. Given his CA from India, I defer to Nitin for his accounting input. He is also our man on the ground," Neeraj Monga, the then Veritas research head, had said in an email for Mangal's profile published by Business Standard in August 2012. Mangal has been integral to our success in India, Monga added.
An Indiabulls report titled 'Bilking India', which landed him in trouble was the second Veritas report Mangal has co-authored with Monga. The first report was on realty major DLF in March 2012. Prior to doing work for Veritas, Mangal was with Indian brokerage Edelweiss Capital. Edelweiss had set up a non-conventional research unit called Analysis Beyond Consensus.
Friends say brainy and frugal Mangal is the sole-breadwinner of his young family, which includes his wife, two daughters (younger one is nine months old) and widowed mother. The four ladies based in Indore are in a miserable situation as the incarceration enters the third week. Mangal himself has co-operated with the surprisingly super-rigorous police investigation process, which required him at one point to 'self-attest' 10,000 pages of documents, which he had downloaded from the ministry of corporate affairs' website as part of his research. That itself sounds like some punishment.
The evidence on record, which is now part of multiple court cases, which I have gone through over the past week, do not suggest any direct involvement of Mangal in the alleged 'extortion' part. He was not the one who sent the mail asking for money. In fact, he did not have any communication with the complainant company August 8, 2012, when the report became public. He was too new and junior to have had any say in the revenue model of Veritas.
All he was trying to do was to play his part in the game - to bowl. Fellow analysts who have read the details of the case are convinced it could at best be a civil case, not a criminal one which demands jail. Twitter has been abuzz with sympathy, some even attempted to mobilise some 'analyst community' response. However, nothing material seems to have emerged as Mangal's lawyer hops from court to court, seeking bail.
Indiabulls and Veritas, both elephants in their own right, have to realise that it is the grass that is suffering in their fight. They should break the stalemate of suits and counter suits, settle it the gentleman's way and move ahead for at least Mangal's sake. But, then, a Singapore diplomat once told me: "The grass suffers even when elephants make love." So, I really don't know.
