How an Indian American tycoon spent $ 3.2 m looking for his kids

In one of the most high-profile child custody cases in the United States, Shah spent a staggering $ 3.2 million (about Rs 13 crore) on a two-year worldwide hunt to trace his two daughters who had been “kidnapped” by his ex-wife after a bitter custody battle.

The case has raised interesting questions in a country where custody battles are frequent, bitter and complicated. But that story comes later.

Shah returned home with his daughters to Philadelphia on Sunday after “recovering” them in Lucerne, Switzerland, to where his ex-wife had spirited them away. There were no details of the operation. Declining all interviews, Shah issued a statement through his publicist saying, “The girls, Sarah Lynn, 9, and Genevieve Marie, 7, are now safe and backhome with their father.”

But the case is far from over. The FBI is still looking for Ellen Dever, 43, Shah’s ex-wife and the mother of the two girls, for breaking custody rights and fleeing to Switzerland. And there are even more legal boondoggles in a case that has transfixed Philadelphia’s legal and law enforcement communities, not to speak of the city’s elite, of which the Shah-Dever couple were a part not too long ago.

Shah came to the United States in 1958 at age 19 to forge a typical immigrant rags-to-riches story. Son of an Indian diamond merchant family who traded in Burma, he graduated from a little-known college in Cleveland, Ohio and enrolled for a doctorate in University of Pennsylvania. One day, his eyeglasses broke and he did not have the money to have them repaired. Philosophy gave way to commerce.

In the next 15 years, Shah conquered dazzling heights in the world of banking, first at the Philadelphia National Bank and later at its successor, CoreStates Financial, where he pioneered theAutomated Teller Machine (ATM) technologies. He was 42, worth millions, and married with a daughter. A workplace affair with Ellen Dever, then a 26-year old computer programmer on a $24,000-a-year salary, ended his first marriage.

Dever and he married in 1985, had two daughters around the turn of the decade, and led a bountiful life — binge shopping in Manhattan, winter getaways in Florida, summer holidays in Europe. Then they fell out. She said he abused her and minged on money. He says she spent recklessly and had adulterous affairs. They divorced in 1992, agreeing on joint custody.

Their relationship, or whatever remained of it, deteriorated over the next five years — he says because of her increasingly demanding lifestyle; and she says for his pattern of verbal and physical abuse and threats. In 1997, Shah sought sole custody of his daughters, believing he had a better case, including letters she wrote him about her affairs. Perhaps anticipating she would lose the battle, Ellen sold the house he hadgiven them, wired $ 420,000 into a Swiss bank account, and fled the United States.

Her ally in this flight was Faye Yager, an Atlanta social worker who formerly led a controversial organisation called the Children of the Underground, which helped conceal women and children from abusive spouses. Shah challenged the allegations that he had ever abused his spouse and filed a $ 100 million suit against Yager as he sought to retrieve his daughters, who by now had disappeared. Yager stood up to all threats and blandishments and said she did not know where they were.

Last year, amid much fanfare, Shah began what was surely the most celebrated childhunt in history, offering a $ 2 million bounty for any information that would lead him to his daughters. He hired the best detectives, former FBI agents, publicists, lawyers and even started an Internet website soliciting information. Spooks spoored across Europe, Africa and Australia on a strange and surreal hunt that put Shah on the cover of Time magazine’s USedition last May in a largely sympathetic story.

That hunt ended as mysteriously and privately last weekend as it had begun publicly. Many months after the media had lost interest in the story, Shah startled local reporters by announcing early this week that he had found his daughters — but he would not say how.

The only information available from his camp is that he did it on his own — and therefore the $ 2 million bounty had been withdrawn.

But there were many questions unanswered. Did Shah have to go through the due legal process to bring back his children — and did he? And what happens now to his ex-wife? According to accounts in the Philadelphia media, a US embassy spokesman in Berne, Switzerland, did acknowledge that Shah circumvented normal procedures in taking his children, but they wouldn’t characterise it as a kidnapping because he had, in the meantime, been granted custody of the children by US courts.

Even outside the legal areas, several questions remained about what one accountdescribed as the “poor little rich kids”.

“So, is this supposed to be a happy ending?” the local Philadelphia Inquirer asked. “If so, for whom? For the man who got what he wanted, thanks to his many millions of disposable dollars? Or for the children, who have been twice grabbed like sacks of valuables slung over a burglar’s shoulders, by two adults who claim to love them?”