A Japanese financial-services group was preparing a major commitment to a large, diversified Indian business group. Before it signed, it wanted what its own market could not tell it: the histories, reputations, and risk factors attached to the target and its principal, political and government connections included, examined by people who could read the Indian record and reach the people who knew it.
“The second phase took what the record suggested and tested it through discreet inquiries around the group.”
The engagement, carried out during my tenure at a global investigations firm, ran in two phases. The first exhausted the record: corporate filings and group structure, directorships, credit and bankruptcy checks, regulatory reprimands, litigation across the High Courts, Supreme Court, tribunals and consumer forums, sanctions and watchlist screening, and press coverage in English and Hindi going back years. The second phase took what the record suggested and tested it through discreet inquiries with established sources around the group: its industry, its counterparties, its former people.
The deliverable was a full report on the group and its principal: structure, subsidiaries, developmental history, reputation, regulatory and political exposure, written so an investment committee sitting in another country could weigh a counterparty it had no native way to read. An interim report kept the client's deal team current while the field work completed; the final report followed two weeks later.
This remains the template for how I approach due diligence on large Indian groups: the public record first, read properly, and then human sources, directed only at what the record cannot answer.