Who Painted My Money White Read online

  His mind returned to the meeting he had with the Finance Minister, a few days before he boarded the flight to Rio. Nicknamed Maida, the Finance Minister, Mylapore Damodaran, was Chennai bred but adapted to the rigmarole of New Delhi politics with ease. He had degrees in law and management. Suave and articulate, he was seen as a slick intellectual in his signature starched white shirt and south Indian veshti. This was his dress code for India; when travelling abroad, he slipped as easily into a well-fitting suit with tie. Proficient in English and somewhat shaky with Hindi, he was well networked in New Delhi circles and a favourite among certain sections of the media.

  Maida had other reputations too. His name was often dragged into controversies, especially to do with financial markets. Though nothing had been proven yet, the grim shadow of his misdeeds fell on his family too, who had supposedly benefited from the position he held. He belonged to the ruling Freedom Party that depended upon his counsel when in trouble.

  Deepak had listened silently, nodding dutifully as Maida outlined the task at hand. The minister gave out curt sharp instructions on a strictly need to know basis. There wasn’t much by way of clarification that the IRS officer needed in the 25-minute briefing. Deepak always felt a general unease in his presence. Of course, he was aware of the controversies that surrounded the minister, but he was careful not to let that cloud his thinking. Besides, there was no point getting on the wrong side with someone as powerful him.

  His thoughts elsewhere, Deepak failed to notice a shadow looming over him. The stranger was a light brown-skinned man, with a rather imposing stature.

  “Hello Deepak,” the man stuck his hand out. “I am Asad Mansoor, your Pakistani counterpart.” Deepak had not met him before and was taken aback. But before he could respond, Asad shushed him and began rattling off Deepak’s life story. “You were born in Bombay and your parents came over from Karachi in 1947, while still in their teens. They came with their parents who had to start from scratch after walking away from thriving textile businesses back in Karachi. Your parents met at a relative’s place and ended up marrying in the early sixties. You have a younger sister who is an advertising executive in Mumbai. Your twin sons are getting ready to apply for college.”

  Deepak gathered his jaw from the floor. He was aghast. Asad smiled and continued, “I was the one who bought the other two LEPE machines. What do you think is going to happen next?” Deepak had no clue. Asad’s smile got wider as he continued.

  “Your piece of the jigsaw puzzle is now over. You will hand this envelope over to your superior and that would be the end of it. A well-entrenched network will take the disassembled machines and paint them over, so a cursory inspection would make it look like a new machine. The machine itself will be invoiced through two or three countries, including Dubai and sometimes Singapore. At every stage, a markup will be added and some money will get siphoned off into the accounts of the stakeholders. When the printing equipment eventually arrives in Mumbai, your customs officials will be told to give it a casual inspection since it is ‘top secret.’ Finally, it will make its way to your currency printing facility at Nashik.

  “The entity that sold these machines operates in the grey market. In other words, it most likely got these machines intercepted when they were about to be cannibalized. Nobody knows where these are hidden till a buyer is found. Then, and lo and behold, it ends up in perfect working condition when re-assembled. But since you and I are signatories to the purchase, should something go wrong, it is us that the government will blame. A used printing machine is not going to print great looking notes. Right?”

  Deepak felt dry in the throat and a film of perspiration appeared on his forehead. What was going on? What was this man’s game? He could not be doing the Indian official, of all people, a favour by sharing all that he did. But something had rattled Deepak even more. If all of this was indeed the truth, he could be in deep trouble. Politicians had a way of covering their flanks, but he was a mere bureaucrat. A pawn, as it appeared to him now.

  He needed to buy himself some insurance if indeed he were to fall into deep shit. Bureaucrats, across the world and especially in India, are adept in this task. He could not afford to wait for the hammer to fall. He would have to devise a strategy in advance to wriggle out of the mess that he would inevitably find himself in sooner or later.

  He gathered his poise and asked, “But why are you telling me all this?” The Pakistani official offered a lopsided grin. “Let’s just say for the moment, that it is a courtesy from one officer to another.” It was obvious that the man would continue to be cryptic. Deepak finally smiled back. Both smiles were obviously fake. Although Deepak had pretty much steadied himself by now, the air still crackled with tension.

  The Pakistani official excused himself and sauntered out of the business lounge, leaving Deepak clutching his coffee mug. And his growing unease.

  CHAPTER 3.

  The Money Laundering Game

  Asad Mansoor’s words kept playing on Deepak’s mind till long after. He had done some reading before heading to Rio and it all began to come back to him. The LEPE acronym is a label of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, US Department of the Treasury, and not an industry name. Printed sheets are sent directly to the LEPE, where the output is a packaged product ready for delivery to the Federal Reserve System. The LEPE essentially consolidates four currency production processes.

  There are three lines of equipment – two in Fort Worth and one in Washington DC. The equipment is roughly half the length of a football field (about 35 meters by 35 meters). The currency sheets coming from the Super Orlof intaglio press are jogged and fed directly into the feeder unit on the far right-hand side of the machine, making their journey to the pallets on the far left-hand side, where they come out as vault-ready cash packs. What makes this equipment remarkable is that it performs multiple inspections and verifications using high resolution cameras as it inspects, prints, verifies and packages currency, all at the rate of approximately 9,000 sheets per hour.

  Much as he tried to take his mind off the whole thing, his thoughts went back to the ‘very honourable’ Finance Minister, Maida.

  The minister was the firefighter for his Freedom Party led government but also turned out to be an embarrassment quite a few times. Deepak had heard of the minister’s uncanny ability to find ways to do graft in just about every deal. There was the case, for instance, of the government’s purchase of security printing paper from a British supplier. It was alleged that Maida, in cahoots with a few senior officials of the Finance Ministry, had ordered the supply of the product from a firm that had been blacklisted.

  It had all begun with the creation of a new government firm to handle currency printing. Maida’s two favourite bureaucrats in the ministry were made founding chairman and managing director of the firm. Unsurprisingly, the Appointments Committee of the cabinet did not handle their appointments, nor were they endorsed by the panel. The unit under Reserve Bank of India, tasked with currency printing, was directed by the new firm to identify a supplier of security printing paper on the pretext that the inventory of the special paper in India was running low.

  The firm that was eventually picked for the job, later stunned the establishment by claiming that some of its employees had falsified the quality of the printing paper. This was in breach of the security contract the company had entered into with the Indian government, and the firm was blacklisted. The government decided to float an e-tender to find a new supplier of security printing paper. However, the new entity hived from the Finance Ministry and headed by Maida’s trusted bureaucrats continued to source the material from the blacklisted firm.

  Not just that, since the blacklisted company held a patent for the currency thread, this too was bought despite the blacklisting. The chairman-bureaucrat wanted to continue import of SPP from the discredited company despite the e-tender having been floated. He decided to write to the Home Ministry on his own, seeking permission from the minister to permit the impor
t of SPP from the firm for three years. The Finance Minister later claimed that he was not privy to this. It was, of course, hard to believe for those who knew well that Maida Damodaran micro-managed matters in his ministry. Nonetheless, he wriggled out of the affair on this flimsy technical point, though few doubted that officials so close to him would have proceeded without his consent.

  Given his stature in the government and the party, nothing much came out of the episode, but it left a bitter taste. It also sent out the clear message that Maida had near indestructible immunity. He had, over the years, survived in the bad world of politics by using all his skills, both cleverly and dubiously. Years ago, he had rebelled against the Freedom Party and joined a breakaway regional group in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Later, he had returned to the party fold, and none the worse for it. He was not only welcomed back but also rewarded with plum posts.

  Deepak, like many other officials, knew of his boss’ abilities and understood the wisdom of not rubbing him the wrong way. Thankfully, he did not have to interact with the minister on a regular basis; the Amazon incident was a rare occasion for which he took direct orders from him.

  The security check for his flight had been announced and Deepak headed towards the gate. The Pakistani official’s words still rang in his head. If he were to be believed, there was financial misappropriation to the tune of a few hundred crore rupees around the corner, with the Finance Minister and his cronies emerging clear beneficiaries. Perhaps the same would be the case for Pakistan. “Not my problem,” he mumbled to himself and shuffled ahead in the queue. He would be in London soon and then on his way to Delhi after a day.

  But what if the Pakistanis were to use the newly acquired second-hand machines to print counterfeit Indian notes and utilise the money to fund their nefarious activities? They were doing it already and the LEPE would be an excellent piece of equipment to scale it up in a big way. Besides, the technology would make the counterfeit currency notes even more difficult to tell apart from the genuine ones.

  On and off, Indian authorities were busting counterfeit currency rackets in various parts of the country, and most had links with Pakistan. From there, the tentacles spread to Indian states such as Kerala, where the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) had its origin. There was an ugly nexus between Pakistani agents often backed by the establishment there and Islamist groups in India. Various Indian agencies including Department of Revenue Intelligence, Customs and Central Excise and the Enforcement Directorate, had their hands full tackling the menace.

  Deepak was aware that the crisis went beyond counterfeit currency. A great deal of money found its way into India through illegal channels like hawala transactions, and they were used to fund Bollywood films and left-wing extremism. Though there were rules governing the foreign exchange remittances, certain groups of people and political parties were having a field day bringing into the country whatever amount they wanted.

  He had heard that people with the right connections (read, with the Freedom Party and its Finance Minister) could bring in any number of containers packed with currency notes to parts of Kerala. He had also heard that everything went on under the supervision of Harish Gopal, the son of a senior Freedom Party politician, Santhana ‘Saga’ Gopal. The counterfeit Indian currency notes would be printed in Pakistan and brought into the country via the Kochi port and would be tactfully distributed to members of a certain community for good effect. A major consequence was price hike of land in Kerala. Nearly everyone who got immensely rich after the windfall was invariably Muslim. The money that was made through this nefarious system found its way to quarrying, sand mining, plywood companies and real estate, most of which were controlled by Muslims again. The banks that were involved could not be touched, thanks to their political patronage. It went far deeper than anyone knew or cared about.

  Much of this would change for the better with the fall of the government, but that would be a few years later. For now, things were pretty grim. Deepak stretched his legs using his aisle seat to advantage, and imagined himself at his modest but comfortable home in Delhi. What he did not relish was the prospect of meeting the Finance Minister to report on the outcome of the mysterious trip he was returning home from.

  CHAPTER 4.

  The Spreading Tentacles

  It was a large room with several desks and today it was packed. They looked like rows of busy neat ants. A hundred chartered accountants were crunching some seriously big numbers. Very busy indeed, doing something that was not their everyday job and certainly not a straight honest task.

  Chartered Accountant No 21 (they were identified by numbers rather than names) made calculations pretty much the whole day. He wondered what the other CAs in the room were assigned with. It did seem like shady stuff but he brushed aside the idea soon enough and focused on the job at hand. He was also tasked with finding a beneficiary to give Rs.5 crores to, from the money on paper he was working with. He reported to a superior and did not ask questions. On a whim though, he wondered if the others too were working on dishing out Rs.5 crores each. That would certainly mean a really big amount of money being moved around. But part of the job was to not ask questions and the promised commission beat anything he would earn through his day job.

  Kerala was submerged under the June monsoon and Imtiaz Ali’s ramshackle hut was under serious threat of being swept away. He was a cycle puncture repairer living with his wife and seven children —three girls and four boys. At the best of times, he managed to make ends meet on a day-to-day basis. In case of a strike or morcha – which were too many too frequent, from issues about better wages or a dharna against a developmental project or the motley protests on killings - his business suffered. On such days, the family barely managed a meal. Such disruptions were common in Kerala, his home and place of work for years now.

  The rain would just not stop. Imtiaz was vulcanizing a puncture on a bicycle tyre, squatting in his usual lungi and vest that had seen better days, and wondering where his next meal would come from. A well-dressed man approached him and came straight to the point, asking Imtiaz if he would like to get a better life in exchange for a few simple tasks.

  Imtiaz rose up slowly, trying to make sense of what the man had said. When the disorientation settled, his first thought was that he was certainly being conned by this suited gentleman. People don’t just walk up to a poor man and promise him loads of money in the middle of nowhere. Besides, he had already resigned to a life of poverty. But he immediately wondered if there could indeed be something useful for him here.

  ‘”What do I have to do?” Imtiaz finally asked, holding his breath.

  The man was pleased. He had not bothered to introduce himself or share his identity in any way. He patted Imtiaz on the shoulder and said, “Come with me and you will not be disappointed.”

  Things started happening swiftly after that. Imtiaz drove with the man to a local co-operative bank where he was made to open a savings account and a fixed deposit account. Before he knew it, Imtiaz found in his hands thick wads of crisp notes, amounting to Rs.5 crores. His hands trembled under their weight. He hadn’t seen even a tenth of this money before. The mystery man asked him to deposit the money in the newly opened account. He quickly did what he was asked to. Now he was the holder of Rs.5 crores and a chequebook issued by the bank. What would be next, he wondered. Despite his giddy glee and lack of education, he knew that all this money was not his for spending. There had to be a catch.

  And there was. He was asked to issue four cheques to a trust he had never heard of, each amounting to Rs.50 lakhs and spaced over six months. That left him with Rs.3 crores. He was then introduced to a man who wished to dispose off his old and dilapidated house for Rs.40 lakhs. Imtiaz, prodded by his benefactor, bought the house immediately. Miraculously, a contractor surfaced too, who offered to bring down the old house and raise a new three-BHK (Bedroom, Hall and Kitchen) house for Rs.60 lakhs. The mystery man goaded Imtiaz to take up the offer. At the end o
f these fast-paced transactions, he still had Rs.2 crores in cash and was the proud owner of a house that he would soon acquire.

  It was all too fairytale-ish to go on in a single day. A lot had already happened and in his deliriousness, Imtiaz did not see the obvious. All he wanted was to rush home and share this new fortune with his family.

  He no longer had to continue with his cycle puncture repair work. In the following days and weeks, he bought himself a multi-utility vehicle, a few new appliances for the house and promptly transferred his children from run down government schools to posher private institutions. Strangely enough, all parties involved (the vehicle agency, appliance seller and earlier the construction contractor) had one thing in common. They were all Muslim.

  He was now down to his last Rs.75 lakhs, which he deposited into a fixed deposit scheme that would fetch him tax exemption and 8% annual interest. After a year, this would give him Rs.6 lakhs per annum as interest. He figured, with the help of his benefactor – Chartered Accountant No 21 - that he could get by with Rs.50,000 a month for the rest of his life. Was there anything else he was expected to do in return? He was told that someone would contact him when the time came.

  Two weeks went by. Imtiaz and his family still could not believe their sudden good luck but indulged themselves, nevertheless. The children had their own room, the wife had a well-equipped kitchen, there was a master bedroom and then two more rooms. When he would occasionally take a stroll in the local bazaar, friends and acquaintances wondered what this sudden change of fortune was all about. After all, Imtiaz now dressed in smart shirts and trousers. Even the umbrella he carried was an expensive one. He no longer haggled over his fish and vegetables, pulling out notes from his wallet (new and pure leather) with all the nonchalance of someone used to big money.