The two men were driven by greed. They wanted to be rich at any cost, even if it meant conning innocent people out of their money. They loved luxury living. Big cars. Drivers, bodyguards. Big houses. Many servants. First class travel and holidays. Power, Women. Sex and everything that money can buy. They want it all. In their own words, they said fuck the stupid malays, fuck the Indians, fuck the ceylonese (me ad few others) and fuck the Chinese and take everything we can. This was uttered by Ranjeet himself and I personally heard on the recording provided by one of ranjeet’s honchos. They just want to be able to spend without ever having to worry about money. Both had same desire and sadly both didn’t have a shred of moral compass. I always thought the Punjabis had more honour especially the Sikhs, many who were my patients but apparently all is just a show. Money seems to be their lord. Curiously, many of my Punjabi patients were also casual money lenders. I should have seen this coming but I was too trusting then.
So they devised a plan to set up a legitimate money lending business promising high returns to investors. While they will do some real money lending business, deep down they knew this business has all the risk and while there could be some return, it will come with the cost of reputation. They were not interested in becoming the so called “ah-longs”. They were not in the business of crude gangsterism but were somewhat in the more stylish “corporate ah-longs” and in the business of fixing corporate needs where law manipulation is concerned or in another terms, they act as “corporate fixers” for any issues between corporate figures and the enforcement or judiciary.
So Rashpal fronted only as “corporate ah-long” and Ranjeet fronted the more common individual lending business or normal “ah-long”. Raspal is also known as “Mr Fix-It” among the few Chinese businessmen who had troubles with the PDRM, MACC, IRB and even SC. One businessman (Mr Soo) even managed to get PR for his “girlfriend” even though she did not qualify and had only been in Malaysia less than 2 years.
Now in order to seemingly run this business and to show legitimacy, both Rashpal and Ranjeet quite easily obtained money lending licenses from the government. Rashpal renamed his old company from Devinder Resources to started Knight Capital SB while Ranjeet used his father’s company known as Asoke SB and later the business was supported by 2 other new entities called G&P Solutions SB and G&P Resources SB.
The idea is to do some money lending business and “cook the book” for the show. The actual income will come from robbing investors using various direct and indirect schemes. They were careful to target people who were not well-versed in financial matters, and they used their connections to the police and regulators to intimidate anyone who tried to expose them. They offered attractive returns of between 1.5% to 2.0% per month to whoever invested into their scheme. The investment was to be used as seed capital for their money lending business.
The money lending business was just a front. It was not doing well at all. They were hardly lending to a hundred people. Mostly this was done as a cover.
The scheme of looting investors worked perfectly at first. The men quickly attracted a large number of investors, and they were able to pocket millions of dollars. Then greed set in. They started to spend more money than they were making, and eventually their appetite for stealing easy money became bigger and bigger.
The plan was to get money from investors and pay interest for not more than one year. For those who are well connected and influential, they keep the spin for longer time so that more investors can be conned.
Like all Ponzi scheme, and especially for late comers and investors, they will be hit the hardest. When the investors started to demand their money back, Ranjeet threatened to report them to the tax authorities. This scared most of the investors off, and they were never able to recover their losses. Rashpal on the other hand, was already well connected with the IRB people and is able to pull strings as and when he wishes to. Rashpal even managed to organise one IRB officer to open file on one of the investors ( a doctor from Jasin) who ended up being fined for error in income declaration. This was good enough to scare the other doctors, investors including me. I had lost all hope and only managed to get back slightly less than half of all monies I handed to Ranjeet.
No comments:
Post a Comment