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Ketan Parekh always let money do the talking

How is it that so little is known about a man with so much money, influence and glamorous friends?

Ketan Parekh, the stockbroker whose arrest on Friday caused Indian stock markets to plunge, moved Indian stock markets.

He schmoozed with India's captains of industry, political party leaders, elected politicians.

And he partied with the glitterati of Bollywood, as India's massively popular cinema industry is known.

Yet, incredibly, there are virtually no newspaper or magazine pictures, no TV news clips, of Parekh.

And interviews are rare.

In the absence of any public persona, the legend grew that Parekh was some sort of financial Wizard of Oz, working the levers of power always from behind a curtain.

What's publicly known about Parekh isn't enough to fill an index card.

A soft-spoken, bespectacled father of two, Parekh is a religious man who starts every day with a visit to the temple.

A chartered accountant by training, he chose instead to carry on the family tradition of stockbroking.

It was only three years ago that Parekh, then 35, began taking huge positions on his books, prompting one business paper to refer to him as a "one-man army" for his ability to move the market.

Parekh spotted the boom in Indian software stocks early, and made his first paper fortune.

His ambitions grew along with his purported wealth, which enabled him to begin functioning as a venture capitalist and merchant banker.

The merchant bank he founded handled the initial public offerings (IPOs) of several companies in the media sector, which Parekh suspected would repeat the success of his earlier bets on Indian software stocks.

THE K-10 INDEX

Parekh's reputed influence in the Indian equity market is so large that that the media began referring to his top 10 holdings as the "K-10" (pronounced the same as his first name, Ketan) index.

The names of all 10 companies in which Parekh was believed to be most heavily invested was widely reported, ironic for a man about whom so little else was known.

It may also have proved his undoing.

In early March a group of other brokers is suspected of mounting an attack on those positions after learning that Parekh was allegedly facing financial problems.

By aggressively short-selling those 10 stocks, they drove down the share prices beyond the means of Parekh to defend them.

All those stocks have plummeted in value the past month -- by between 22 to 79 percent.

On Friday, Parekh was arrested by Indian federal police acting on a complaint filed against him by a state-owned bank.

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