How A Man Became An NPA

It didn't quite match up to a biriyani or the Charminar but in the last decade Global Trust Bank (GTB) had grown to become another Hyderbadi institution. However, recently the bank's founder Ramesh Gelli had begun hogging the headlines for the wrong reasons. And GTB's fortunes got invariably linked with Gelli, who projected himself as the small-big-man of Indian banking. An engineer and not a banker by training, Gelli began his career with the Hyderabad-based tobacco giant vst before moving on to BHEL and AP Road Transport Corporation. It was after he joined Vysya Bank as a GM in 1980 that his career skyrocketed. In just three years, at 37, he became the youngest chairman of an Indian bank. He was awarded the Padmashri in 1991.

With the opening up of the banking sector in 1993, the poster boy of Indian banking applied for a licence to start a private bank. His partners: Sridhar Subasri and Jayanta Madhab, who had spent 24 years with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila. They also roped in the International Finance Corporation and the ADB as shareholders. GTB opened for business in 1994. It raised some eyebrows then that the key promoters, who were former bank executives, raised Rs 40 crore as their equity contribution. Its ipo was oversubscribed 60 times and the day it opened for business the bank reportedly received deposits worth Rs 100 crore.

But things came unstuck over three years ago, just before Gelli was set to architect GTB's merger with UTI Bank. Allegations surfaced that he, alongwith rogue broker Ketan Parekh, had manipulated GTB's scrip price, which shot up from Rs 65 to Rs 114 in the months before the impending merger. The jpc investigating the Parekh scam "didn't rule out the possibility" that it had been rigged. Before he was eased out as GTB's CMD, there were murmurs that he used his proximity with diamond merchants to garner funds to save his bank. He dropped hints that he was keen to jump into the electoral fray but no political party, including the tdp, offered him a ticket. And last month, his days as the "superbanker" of private banks seem to be over.