Harshad Shantilal Mehta was born on 29th July 1954, at Paneli, Rajkot district, in a Gujarati family. He completed his degree course: B.Com in 1976 from Lajpatrai College Mumbai and worked several low-income jobs for the next eight years. During this time, he had been desirous of making money so he stepped into the share market via a job at a brokerage firm. During the very initial days of him in the “Ring” where shares were sold or acquired by these jobbers. Slowly and steadily he made a good amount of profits for which his brokerage firm would give him a small amount of commission. Realizing the fact that Harshad’s ideologies, research, and methods were new and far away from the traditional approach of regular jobbers so he decided that he won’t let them exploit his brain and resigned from the firm, filed for registration of license to trade freely in the stock market. Once he was able to establish his pillars of success, his story began.
There is this belief that Hrashad came to Mumbai with just Rs 40 with him, belonging to a fairly middle-class family he had his own set of dreams which he somehow managed to achieve but at what cost. He was able to influence the country to such an extent that by the end of the 1990s he had control over the Bombay Stock Exchange. Though he was called the Big Bull, he was also famous as the Amitabh Bachan of the Bombay Stock Exchange. He started his Golden days of making tremendous profits under different brokerage firms across Mumbai, he started to make contacts with the important employees of certain companies. This is called “Insider trading”, though this was not ethical RBI had no rules to consider it illegal in those days. The critical inside information of the companies helped Harshad to estimate the rise or fall in the price of shares according to which he would set up clients assuring them with profits. Slowly he established his own brokerage agency namely Grow More brokerage and asset management. When he started to deal with all the major big firms, already became the highest advanced taxpayer of the country taking over Mr. Dhiruhai Ambani. After conquering the share market his next desire was the capital market. To step into the capital market he needed clients like Banking Organizations so he first tried to contact international banks like the Citi bank which refused his offer, then he started to summon together small banks who were, then, struggling with profits, or condoning losses. RBI had guidelines that all banks have to maintain a certain amount of securities as the assets so whenever a bank was in deficit of securities it asked for the securities from the bank which had surplus there were never physical assets exchanged, banks issued BR (Bank Receipts). To get the best deal and save time and money banks used to transfer the payment of such BRs to Brokers and they were given a time period of 14 days to send the money forward. Here comes Harshad’s so-called “ SCAM”. Here he noticed the flaw in the Indian banking system, the money which was in the brokers account for the time period of 14 days could be used to reinvest in the stock market and with funds like 500 crores, one could literally have a monopoly over the share market, “Big Bull” Harshad Mehta was easily playing with shares, he partnered up with some companies who had potential but had no capital so the shares with prices as low as Rupee 15, he made an unimaginable jump in the Sensex by purchasing those shares at a large amount which made the price of shares increase suddenly which made others feel to invest in the share. Some People still believe that this was not actually a scam because these methods of doing business were already being used in the capital market. When Harshad was able to convince State Bank Of India to come in business with him, here comes the time when the journalist Sucheta Dalal noticed with some internal sources of the Bank that funds were missing from the books of SBI and employees window dressed the balance sheets when this went to further investigate his chapters of so-called “Rags to Riches” unveiled. Then CBI’s involvement had completely cleared the air when measured in terms of today the money involved was more than 24000 crores which makes it India’s biggest financial scam to date.
Once the scam was exposed, a lot of banks were left holding BRs which did not have any value. The banking system had been shaken by a whopping Rs 4,000 crore. Mehta made a brief comeback as a stock market guru, giving tips on his own website as well as a weekly newspaper column. This thing, too, did not last long. However, by the time he died, Mehta had been convicted in only one of the cases filed against him. He had over 600 civil cases against him.