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The Rediff Business Special / Shobha Warrier

Once bitten, twice hopeful

Early morning last Wednesday, thousands of people from places like Shimla, Trichy, Sangli and several other Indian cities and towns converged at the New Woodlands Hotel in Madras.

It was amazing that these people -- strangers to one another, hailing from different places, talking in different languages -- interacted with ease. For all of them shared one anubhav -- angst. All of them had invested with the Anubhav group's teak plantation/ agro-forestry project, which was forced to shut down recently, leaving them all high and wet with tears.

The troubled investors assembled at the hotel because all of them had received a letter from an advocate that they could come and check all the records and the balance-sheet of the company.

Some of them squatted on the approach road, others stood hours on end, a few others strutted up and down the road looking hassled and disturbed, worry writ large on their faces. Now and then, some would argue animatedly, make loud noises, eagerly share their woes and feelings. Some others would bear it all silently as their sheer number dwarfed the room that could barely accommodate a thousand.

As one spoke with willing investors, the revelation surfaced that a lot many of them still have faith in Natesan, the man who has allegedly cheated them!

They are willing to give Natesan at least a couple of years time to set everything right.

"Even after all this, do you believe him?"

"Yes, it was because of the SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India) that all this happened. Natesan's idea, especially that of the teak plantation, was good. The group was functioning well," said a literate-and-elderly-looking investor.

Hundreds of investors of his ilk -- people who held high positions while in service and invested their lifetime savings after their retirement -- either agreed or disagreed.

A gentleman identified himself as ''a former minister from Ahmedabad''. He had invested his ''hard-earned Rs 2.5 million'' with Anubhav. He shouted from an elevated spot like a true politician: "Give us our money back, our hard-earned money, our money, our children's money, our grand-children's money. I'll see that all of us get our money back soon."

Many ignored him, others just whispered in anger. "Hard-earned, ha! He wants us to believe that? He will only be interested in getting his money back, like all selfish politicians," one of the aggrieved investors said.

Sulaiman from Bangalore had invested Rs 36,000 in the teak plantation of Anubhav. He does not want the company to be liquidated. "How much can they recover? How long will it take? I may get some 6,000 rupees instead of my 36,000. At the same time this politician may get one million. I don't want 6,000 now. I am ready to give Natesan some time.

''We Indians get panicky very fast. All of us should sit together and give the company a chance to run for another two years, which Natesan is asking for. But some people are shouting from the rooftop, 'We want our money back.' It is sheer madness. I don't regret having invested. I did this after making a lot of calculations and deliberations."

Not everyone was so gung-ho about Natesan's ability to pluck money out of teak again. Gurdev Singh Garcha from Ludhiana moved away from the crowd, sat in one corner and said in a poetic way.

''Paisa to marnewala hai / Hum bhi kyon na mar jaye? / Ludhiana se aake / Isiliye tho rahta hoon yehan. (Money is bound to die. So must I. That's why I've come from Ludhiana to stay here.)"

"My wife said, don't invest in this. My sons said don't invest. But I did. Why? Because I was greedy. I got Rs 600,000 after retirement and invested every single penny in the teak plantation.''

And he went on: "Log aake meethi, meethi bathen bolne lage. Aur hum meethi, meethi bathon me phas gaye. Ithna ho jayega, ithna ho jayega, they said. Aur dekho, kya ho gaya, kya haal hai hamara? (People did some sweet talk. I got trapped. They said your money would grow very fast. But look what's happened, look at my plight.)"

Gurdev Singh is a firm believer in the Paramatma, he believes that one day he will get his money back. "If not, I told my wife, we will live on my pension. After all, Paramatma decides what is good for us!" He smiled a wry smile.

If Singh got carried away by his own counsel, K S Thakore from Shimla was forced by one of his friends from Chandigarh to invest with Anubhav. He had invested Rs 90,000 in 1995. In 1996 and 1997 he received Rs 21,000 each and he should have got the same amount in 1998 and 1999. By 2000-end, he stood to get Rs 100,000. But alas, he could not encash the 1998 cheque.

"It came as a rude shock to me. People say that Natesan has squandered money by setting up posh offices in various parts of the country. The main question is: why do people invest in these kinds of firms? Because people want to make more money, fast. What do we get from the nationalised banks as interest? A mere 5 to 7 per cent! Whereas Anubhav was paying 21 to 24 per cent interest. Why can't the government pay better interest?" Thakore asked angrily. He went to the Anubhav office only to find it abandoned.

Similar craving for more money lured Ramakrishna's old parents from Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh, into the Anubhav fold. The old couple had invested Rs 150,000 much against the son's advice. "See, I am a self-employed man. I believe in investing in my own work. I told my parents to plant teak in their own yard so that they could see the trees growing and they would get the fruits also later on, without any worry. We have to work hard if we invest in our own place. Nothing will come easy."

George, a former employee of the Central Reserve Police Force, invested Rs 34,000 in Anubhav after his retirement six years back. He was surprised and shocked when ''a big, reputed company like Anubhav'' collapsed. "This is a very bitter lesson for me. Hereafter I will not invest in any private firm, even if it is run by multi-billionaires. This is my last experience," he declared with an air of finality.

Prema Lakshminarayana, a Madras-based doctor, invested Rs 14,000, ''a very small amount'' in 1992 because she was attracted by their advertisement talking about making the environment green. She was very happy with the company because they were promptly paying her till now. Even now she feels it was because of the panic reaction of the investors that Anubhav collapsed.

G K Sen feels otherwise. After retiring from the Indian Air Force, he decided to invest all his retirement money, that is Rs 900,000 in the Anubhav group. He and his wife withdrew Rs 400,000 last year for medical purposes; now Rs 500,000 are with the group. Both of them had come from Delhi not with the hope of recovering any money but to put forward their opinion. Sen blamed the growth of several fake companies that do not even have a piece of land but offer lucrative rates to people as the reason behind the fall of Anubhav, ''a genuine company''.

Velayudhan, Rajendran and Pandian Abraham from Trichy invested in Anubhav because it looked quite unlike other ordinary finance companies. "We believed in Natesan.'' They are angry that the government did not act in time when the company was aggressively advertising in newspapers and on television channels. ''We thought we will get our money back when the trees grow. We feel they might have misused the finances for investing in film production, etc. Otherwise, how can teak plantations fail?"

Yes, how can they, if people like Dilip Walavalkar of Sangli travel all the way to Madurai to inspect the Anubhav teak plantation and return truly impressed? Walavalkar pumped in Rs 90,000. His wife, Manisha, said exasperatedly, "We would have got the returns from the next year. We did not expect this to happen. Teak was a big attraction to us, our first investment with a private firm. Now we repent our decision. No more private investments."

According to Walavalkar, SEBI had caused the crash. "For the last year, SEBI stopped them from investing further. Without any inflow, how do you expect them to give their investors any money? We still believe in Natesan. The SEBI took one year to come out with a rating and after that too, they gave a very poor rating to it." Agreed Rohit Anthi of Shimla who represents some 600 investors of Himachal Pradesh.

Now what? ''When he was facing liquidity problems, when SEBI was troubling him, Natesan should have taken all his investors into confidence. He did not do that. That was where he went wrong. He should not have closed down everything and gone underground. Till he went underground, all of us believed in him and his company. See, there are many investors who want to stand behind him and the company. But now we feel that he may cheat again, as he had done once. We really do not know whether to trust him anymore," Anthi said.

While scores of dejected yet hopeful investors felt Natesan deserves one more chance, the treasurer of the newly formed Anubhav Investors Association, Rajaram, said their main intention was to liquidate the company and sell Natesan's assets to give the investors their money back.

Photographs: Sreeram Selvaraj

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