The markets – capital markets especially is a great teacher. However, the characteristics of this teacher are unique:
1. Takes the fee upfront
2. Lessons are taught the hard way, but students do not remember it long enough
3. Never negotiates fees – the dumber the student the higher the fee, and no mercy is shown!
There are some [...]
Thanks to Satyam, now independent directors are all asking for a one-to-one meeting with the statutory auditors. One satutory auditor I know, told the board, sorry “I did not check the cash on hand” – and the board insisted that petty cash (in 47 locations) should be checked immediately. This is what is called being [...]
I must consider my self very, very lucky. During the Harshad Mehta Boom, I bought an office space for personal usage. When the index reached 21000 I had no reason to sell. However just luckily I decided to get out of some very high price earning stocks like Tata Power, L&T, Hdfc, and invest in [...]
About 4 years ago I was offerred the job of an Internal Auditor in a leading life insurance company. I did not seriously consider that option because I realised that the role would be that of a faithful dog. You had to stand in front of the Board and say things are just fine. It [...]
Since everybody was now talking of Corporate Governance, I decided to see what it actually means. Well Wikipedia defines corporate governance as follows:
Corporate governance is the set of processes, customs, policies, laws and institutions affecting the way a corporation is directed, administered or controlled. Corporate Governance also includes the relationships among the many stakeholders involved [...]
This is crazy. What has happened in Satyam for me looks like an action replay. When Ketan Parekh was ramping up his’K10′ shares I was asked why am I not buying a particular ‘S’ software. It was flouted to me that a particular fast growing fund was buying its shares and the company was doing [...]