Devil in Pinstripes (25 page)

M
anish Kakkar landed in Hyderabad in the wee hours of the morning. The Singapore Airlines SQ 187 was late by an hour. By the time he reached his hotel it was well past 2 a.m.

The check-in counter at the Grand Kakatiya had a message for him. It was from Aditya. ‘Call me when you reach. Irrespective of the time. I am in room No 1209.’ He knew that Aditya was also staying in the same hotel.

‘Will call him from my room,’ he said to himself as he made his way to his fourth floor room. Aditya’s suite was on the more anointed and exclusive twelfth floor. He was the boss and an executive suite was his privilege.

Aditya picked up the phone on the first ring. He had been waiting for Manish to call. ‘Come up to my room. I need to see you right away.’ When he heard this, Manish took the lift to the twelfth floor and walked up to the room at the far end of the corridor. The door was open. He walked straight in.

‘Hi Manish, how have you been my friend?’

‘Great Aditya, what’s going on?’ asked Manish while he surveyed the room. The TV in Aditya’s room was playing the news hour on CNN. An inane newsreader was mumbling something which was related to a red band at the bottom of the screen that screamed ‘Breaking News’.

‘Oh. Another car bomb in Iraq has blasted seventy-four people.’

‘No Aditya. I was asking about what’s going on in Hyderabad? You called me in such a hurry. I just hopped on to the first available flight. I knew that there would be an emergency. Else, you wouldn’t call me in this manner. What happened?’

‘Manish, years back, when you guys were just setting off on your career, there was a collections disaster. We had repossessed a wrong car that had caused nuisance to someone who hadn’t even borrowed from us. That hit the front pages of the
Wall Street Journal
hours before our annual results were to be declared.’

‘Yes. I know the story.’

‘It cost the key people in the company their jobs and extreme loss of face for the organisation. Some even went to the extent of saying that the timing of the story was dictated by our competitors, with the sole intention of embarrassing NYB.’

‘I know.’

‘We seem to be heading towards a similar disaster again.’

‘You are obviously referring to the Marriott driver suicide case. What’s the development there? Are we clean?’

‘Manish, it does not matter whether you are clean or not. What matters is what the public perceives and what the media states.’ Manish nodded in response.

‘A day after this guy committed suicide, the family too committed suicide. The wife and the four children. She poisoned the children before killing herself. This has already blown up in India. Somehow I get a feel that the international media will step into this very soon. I am sure they will . . . sooner than later.’

‘I am aware Aditya.’

‘I know. I had sent across the incident report to our Singapore office as a matter of routine escalation. However, I do not believe the stories that everyone around is telling me. Everyone is telling me that we are on the right side in this entire episode. But I am not convinced. My job and the organisation’s reputation is at stake. I want to get to the bottom of this myself. In such a situation I don’t trust anyone around. And that’s why I called you. Remember this is in Amit’s line of command. Ideally I would have got him to sort it out for me, but given that he might be the impacted party and might have a vested interest in not bringing out the truth, it is important that we do this on our own. An independent perspective always helps.’

‘OKAY. So, what do you expect of me?’

‘Let me tell you the story in its entirety . . . as we know it . . .’ and Aditya began narrating the entire sequence of events. He told him about everything that had happened over the past few days in Hyderabad.

‘Aditya, a question,’ said Manish when Aditya paused for breath. ‘Isn’t Tulsiram a customer who has paid all his dues? I was told that all his payments have been made and there is no overdue? That’s what the initial incident report said.’

‘Yes Manish. You are right. However, here’s why I do not trust what is being told to me.’ And he handed Manish a sheet of paper. ‘I have a small concern here. Don’t know if anyone else has picked it up yet. But here, look at his statement of accounts.’

Manish looked carefully at the document given by Aditya. It was a loan account statement of Tulsiram.

‘Cheque returned unpaid means that the cheque which was presented has bounced,’ said Aditya even as he looked at Manish and winked.

‘Aditya!’ The drag on the last few alphabets was a conscious one. ‘I have worked in India for over a decade, long enough to know that,’ said Manish. Aditya was just having some fun.

Manish went through the statement and looked up at Aditya. ‘He has bounced each of his last four instalments.’

‘Yes. Except for the December instalment cheque, which he has paid on time. The ones for August, September, October and November have bounced.’

‘Not only that. He has also paid up in cash every month before the month end. In August he paid early, but in the later three months he has paid dot on the last day of the month.’

‘What does that show?’ asked Aditya.

‘That the collections team has been pushing him aggressively and getting him to make these payments before the end of the month,’ Manish replied.

‘In other words these are customers who have a habit of bouncing their cheques but are easy to collect from, with a little bit of follow up. A debt collector’s delight, right?’

‘Yes Aditya. That’s what it looks like. I would also assume that he is a low risk customer as we have been able to repeatedly and successfully collect his dues from him. And you are bang on . . . collectors normally like to deal with customers like these.’

‘Agreed. What you are saying could be right. One of the possibilities,’ said Aditya.

‘What else could it be? You are obviously thinking of something else.’ Manish was now beginning to wonder what he meant. ‘What’s on your mind Aditya?’

‘It could be that instead of him, someone else is making the payment on his behalf?’

‘Who could it be? And why would someone make a payment on his behalf? Unless you are implying a fraud in the system.’

‘Yes Manish. Do you think that could be an option?’

‘Hmm . . .’ Manish began to ponder. ‘That could be serious.’ He couldn’t say anything else.

‘If you go back to Tulsiram’s loan repayment, he has bounced his check in the past, before August too, but never with such regularity. Often, he has paid much before the 30th. Look at August. He paid on 22 August. Prior to that he bounced his cheque in May, but paid almost immediately. On 13 May. The trend in the last three months is strange. Every month he has paid dot on the last day of the month. Why? The cash payments on the same day is too much of a coincidence.’

‘I can investigate and find out if your suspicion is true,’ added Manish.

‘I know. Normally, the only way to check this is to call the customers and check if they have in fact made these payments on the last day of the month. But in this case, there is no way in which we can get in touch with Tulsiram. Unfortunately, Vodafone’s network didn’t follow him where he went.’

Manish smiled.

‘If what I suspect is true, it could be a serious fraud, a big controls lapse and we could be up shit creek,’ Aditya continued.

‘What would you want me to do in this?’

‘I want you to get to the bottom of this. Find out who is responsible, who is screwing up. Find out if at all we had a role to play in abetting the suicide, directly or indirectly. Can anyone link it back to NFS? Do it carefully. I don’t want too many eyebrows to be raised. There are not many people who I can trust in this situation. I want you to do it for me. Can you?’

‘How much time do we have for this?’

‘Twelve hours.’

‘What? Twelve hours?’ Manish was shocked. It was too short a time frame.

‘I am here in Hyderabad for a meeting with the chief minister on a SEZ project funding. Taking the evening flight to Mumbai. I need the report by the time I leave. You don’t need to give me a written report. Just let me know your findings. Actually, I think I know what the story is. I just want someone to validate this.’

‘Can I get Amit involved?’

‘You must be kidding my friend. If he was required, why would I fly you in from Singapore?’

‘Got it. Will do my best to close it today.’

‘Here are all the papers I have got. I will expect your call tomorrow evening . . . actually this evening. You have my authority to do whatever you want. Call upon whoever you want. Interrogate who ever you choose to. Do what it takes. At the end of the next twelve hours, I want to know if there has been a screw up and if indeed there has been one, I want to know who is responsible. The person responsible for the screw-up needs to go. Whether it is Amit, whether it is Victor, I don’t care. I will go by what you tell me.’

‘I will call you in the evening.’

‘Better still, if you have nothing else to do in Hyderabad, take the evening flight back to Mumbai along with me. I will ask my secretary to book you on the same flight.’

Manish nodded. He knew that now the twelve hour deadline was cast in concrete. He had no means of extending it.

Manish was awake the whole night . . . reading all the documents that Aditya had given him, trying to digest the information and form his own views on what could have happened. For a moment he browsed over the fact that Aditya could have called Amit to do what he was asking Manish to do. Why didn’t he? Maybe Aditya did not like him as much as he did earlier. Were there any issues between them? Probably he didn’t trust Amit. Anyway it was none of his business. He had to do what was told to him. Period.

By the time he finished going over the sequence of events again and again in his mind – the customer, the amounts due, the instalment paid, the cash on a month end, the suicide and then the mass suicide, the public frenzy and the resultant political involvement – the phone in his room rang. He picked it up. Who could it be at this hour?

‘Good morning sir. This is a wake up call for you.’ What the hell? A look at his watch told him that it was already 6.30 in the morning, and he hadn’t slept even for a minute. Aditya had given him only twelve hours. He quickly showered and was ready by 7.15 a.m. Sleep could wait. He rushed down to the coffee shop for breakfast.

Before leaving Aditya’s room, he had sent a message to Victor, to be in the hotel by 7 a.m. He knew that Victor was an early riser and hence would definitely see the message and be with him at seven.

As he had expected, Victor was waiting for him at the lobby. ‘Hi Manish. How come in Hyderabad? A surprise visit?’ Victor had not expected Manish to be in Hyderabad. As a matter of fact, Manish was known to be a poor traveller and wouldn’t visit his operative locations even during his stint as a head of credit at NFS.

‘I had to come here to close a deal with a credit analytics firm. We might be buying a data analytics package from this Hyderabad company. That’s why I came in yesterday morning,’ he lied. ‘When Aditya got to know that I was here, he asked me to take a look at the processes that you guys run.’

‘I understand. You too are here in connection with the suicide issue? Amit was here yesterday and you are here today.’ Victor was not an idiot and was quick to see through Manish’s clumsy attempt at lying. Manish didn’t respond. He just smiled. Within minutes, they were walking out of the hotel, into Victor’s car, on their way to the NFS branch in Hyderabad.

Manish got down to work almost immediately on reaching the branch. The conference room in the front office of the branch was free and became Manish’s den for the day.

He asked for the application form, the documents submitted by Tulsiram, the fraud check results . . . almost the same documents that Amit had asked for. All those were quickly reviewed and shoved back into the cupboard in twenty minutes. Nothing fishy there. The receipt books were next on his list.

The collections receipt books are an integral part of any collections process. These receipt books or rather receipt pads are given to all the collection agents. They are sequentially numbered and the collection agents are supposed to carry them whenever they go on their field visits. These are meant to be issued to every customer who pays up his overdue instalment to the agent when they go knocking on the customer’s door. The collection agent fills out these receipts in duplicate and gets the customer’s signature on them as an acknowledgement. A copy is then given to the customer as a proof of him having paid the instalments to the agent of NFS. The receipts are audited every month to see if receipts are available for every payment collected. The audit needs to validate the receipts corresponding to every payment picked up by the collection agent.