Yes Bank was once one of the most trusted banks in India, but the actions of one man and inactions of others led to the downfall of a banking empire. A Kashmiri journalist captures the most intimate details of what happened over the course of years in a gripping financial thriller. The 28-year-old Bengaluru-based journalist Furquan Moharkan's "The Banker Who Crushed His Diamonds" will take you back to the time when Yes Bank was a rising empire and what led to its downfall at the hands of its founder Rana Kapoor.
Moharkan's book, which is at the top of the charts on Amazon Books, is critically-acclaimed for detailing how a bank that had a balance sheet size of Rs 3.8 lakh crore collapsed. What makes Moharkan's book a must-read to dive deeper into the Yes Bank saga is that he was the first to blow the whistle on modern India's biggest banking failure and following everything that went wrong thereafter.
"This banking failure, more than anyone else, needs much more critical scrutiny. And there are reasons for it. The red flags about the mess at YES Bank's loan book were in the public domain as early as 2015. But no one batted an eye. Its then MD and co-founder Rana Kapoor was given free hand for three more years from then before RBI forced him to step down," Moharkan told International Business Times.
Rise and fall of empire
Yes Bank failure prevented by a bailout from the SBI and RBI gives a chilling account of how the misgovernance at a bank drowned a well-backed business model. How Rana Kapoor stepped down from the role of MD in 2018 but refused to sell off the shares as they were "invaluable" at the time, only to sell them off later.
"Having covered the bank closely, I knew this story was worth a financial thriller, that it's aggrieved shareholders wanted to know. What happened to the bank that showed the promise? How was what happened on March 5 related to the past of the bank? How did the actions of one man, and inactions of others, cause a systemic threat to the Indian financial system? What are the lessons we learn from this saga? I wanted to bring out all this in the book," Moharkan added.
The foreword of the book is written by Andy Mukherjee, a senior columnist with Bloomberg, it is published by Penguin Random House India.
