Ketan Parekh

Ketan Parekh was a Mumbai-based stock broker. He hails from a well-to-do Gujarati family involved in share trading, and Ketan was involved in the shares scam of 2000-2001 on the Indian Stock Market.

Companies, when raising money from the stock market, rope in brokers to back them in raising the share price. Ketan formed a network of brokers from smaller exchanges like the Allahabad Stock Exchange and the Calcutta Stock Exchange, and used benami, or share purchases, in the name of poor people living in the shanty towns of Mumbai. Ketan rose to fame at the same time as the worldwide dot-com boom (1999-2000) and he relied primarily on the shares of ten companies for his dealings (now known infamously as the K-10 scrips).

[1] Ketan had large borrowings from Global Trust Bank, whose shares he was ramping up so that he could get a good deal at the time of its merger with UTI Bank. He got a Rs 250 crore loan from Global Trust Bank, although Global Trust’s chairman Ramesh Gelli, who was later asked to resign, repeatedly asserted that the amount was less than Rs 100 crore, which was in keeping with the Reserve Bank of India's normal amount. Ketan and his associates obtained another Rs 1,000 crore from the Madhavpura Mercantile Co-operative Bank despite the fact that RBI regulations ruled that the maximum loan a broker could obtain was Rs 15 crore. In addition, Mr Mehta's best friend, Mr Pravin Ruparel was involved with Ketan's Business in 1996.

Ketan's modus operandi was to ramp up the shares of select firms in collusion with promoters. Interestingly, around the time when Ketan started taking long positions in his favorite K-10 scrips, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) concluded a 3-year old case against Harshad Mehta, who had colluded with the managements of BPL, Sterlite and Videocon to ramp up their shares.

In Ketan's case, SEBI found prima facie evidence of price rigging in the scrips of Global Trust Bank, Zee Telefilms, HFCL, Lupin Laboratories, Aftek Infosys and Padmini Polyme