Inside Track: White collar criminals and Page 3 People

White collar criminals rarely, if at all, pay for their crimes in these permissive times.

Not long ago, the owner of Zee TV, Subhash Chandra Goel, was harassed no end by the Directorate of Foreign Exchange Regulation Act on the basis of what eventually turned out to be a wholly frivolous complaint. The complainants supposedly were two sitting MPs.

Goel had to make several trips to the dingy offices of the Fera Directorate in New Delhi and was called upon to furnish all manner of documents and accounts to prove his innocence.

Besides, the charges of alleged violation of Fera by the Zee boss were splashed in a section of the press, thus condemning him even before the inquiry could be completed.

The then deputy director, Fera, Ashok Aggarwal, took special interest in investigating the case against Goel.

But eventually after a painstaking inquiry Goel was cleared by the Fera directorate. And it turned out that the whole thing was a conspiracy hatched by a former employee of Goel who had since teamed up with a rival TV channel.

The employee had got hold of the letterheads of the two MPs. When asked whether they had filed the complaint against Goel, the two MPs pleaded complete ignorance. A subsequent inquiry confirmed that their signatures were indeed forged.

Since then the Fera Directorate has closed the case against Goel.

And as for Aggarwal, he was jailed in another case of forgery and fraud and is now under suspension, awaiting his trial for having amassed wealth far in excess of his known sources of income.

But the former employee of Goel who had masterminded the whole conspiracy against the Zee boss in order to win a lucrative deal from a rival TV channel has gone completely scot free, this when there is plenty of evidence to link him with Aggarwal's nefarious activities.

Worse, the capital's Page Three People, aware of the antecedents of Goel's one-time tormentor, do not have any qualms socialising with him...

Talking of white collar crime, in the capital city of India the name of the game is networking. And all that you need to network is to secure an opening in the world of fixers and wheeler-dealers by holding a big bash at your house or, preferably, at a five-star hotel.

Initially, not everyone of the 100-odd Page Three People who wine and dine regularly might show up. But do not lose hope, for PTPs do not like to dine alone at home, and may be on your second or third invite most of them would put in an appearance. And that would truly signal your arrival in the world of the capital's movers and shakers.

And if the PTPs come, can senior babus and cops be far behind? No PTP guest list is complete without a fair sprinkling of senior bureaucrats.

Recently a media-connected PTP hosted a five-star bash and invited, of all the people, a senior man from the excise and customs department with whom he did not have a nodding acquaintance earlier.

The host solicited the presence of the big honcho promising him that he would meet powerful children of a senior politician and other such VVIPs. The official showed up but was surprised when a few days later the host asked him to post a couple of his 'friends' in the customs to lucrative jobs!

Whether or not Dr Vijay Kelkar's recommendations on overhauling the country's taxation system find favour with his boss, Finance Minister Jaswant Singh, it was quite clear that a section of his own colleagues were none too happy with his proposals. They were keen to arrange an early burial for his recommendations on direct and indirect taxes.

At least one babu, N.K. 'Nandu' Singh, who since his retirement from the IAS, had been given a perch in the Planning Commission, was heard making highly critical noises on the Kelkar report.

Indeed, so keen was Nandu to ensure that the Kelkar recommendations were trashed, he is said to have put a call to a senior financial journalist asking him to take a very critical approach on the Kelkar report.

Marxists claim to be godless. Then what was Bharati Roy, a former CPM member of the Rajya Sabha and one-time pro-vice chancellor of Calcutta University, doing making a spectacle of herself in Union Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani's office in Parliament House, insisting on sharing with him the 'prasadam' from the Jagannath temple in Puri.

Advani was in the midst of an important meeting when Roy burst into his room and gave him the 'prasadam.'

Later, Roy gave the 'prasadam' to other visitors waiting for their turn to see Advani. The question is whether the Marxists, particularly her mentor, Jyoti Basu, would approve of Bharati's double jeopardy, particularly when Advani's brand of Hindutva is anathema to the West Bengal Red Brigade.

Politicians think they are the new maharajas. The other day a member of Parliament walked into a dentist's at a government hospital in New Delhi and ordered the doctor attend to him first.

The doctor politely declined, explaining that the gentleman in the dentist chair had already been administered local anesthesia and, besides, he had come with a prior appointment while he (that is, the MP) had not bothered to fix any appointment.

This made our 'neta' mighty angry. He threw a fit and walked out from the hospital threatening to fix the dentist.

Sure enough, a few days later the dentist received a long memo from his superiors, asking him to explain his conduct. The doctor stood his ground, though the long complaint filed by the MP was still doing the rounds in the maze of the Health Ministry bureaucracy!