The hair has thinned and is streaked with grey, the face is a little tired and the last seven years have added several kilos to his frame, yet on the day of his first conviction last week Big Bull Harshad Mehta, the main accused in the Rs 5,000-crore Securities Scam continued to smile. When he told the media horde that - ``We have faith in the judiciary. We will appeal to the Supreme Court,'' he wasn't just putting on a brave face. That is Harshad Mehta, the first superstar of the stock markets, an eternal optimist and a believer in the dictum that the end - of making his mega dreams come true - justifies the means.In June 1992, when he was released from 110 days of custody, he told me, ``Congratulation. You have broken the story of the decade.'' It was typical Harshad, an infectious ability to revel even in the glare of negative publicity. It was almost as though Harshad was oblivious to the consequences of that story - he was so completely optimistic that he would quickly work his way out of the messand rebuild another big dream. In 1999, the score of cases filed against him in the Special Court is one down and about two dozen more to go. At the present pace this would roughly translate to at least a decade more of a continuous court room attendance. Yet, for one who has tracked the former Big Bull for almost a decade, the question is not whether Harshad Mehta's endless ideas, energy and ambition will survive the gruelling litigation, but what mega scheme will he dream up next? And what will be the short cut he takes to get on to the fast track.Harshad Mehta's downfall has always been his flashiness. The trait goes back to Raipur in 1971 when as a 16-year-old he was asked by his school principal to bring his father to school. Too scared to inform his strict father about his pranks, he simply went for a movie and the next day, persuaded an elderly man to accompany him to the principal. ``My father is not in town, so I have brought my uncle,'' he told the principal. It was a neat trick and he would havegot away too but for the fact that he could not stop bragging about it to his schoolmates and one of them squealed. He was promptly rusticated.It was the same in 1992. The media was in raptures over dominance over the stock markets and unconcerned about investigating his mysterious and endless supply of funds. Harshad himself lived the dream of small time punters. His fleet of cars, luxurious apartment and flashy lifestyle was meant to demonstrate to the small time punter, that he too could have untold riches if he followed Pied Piper Harshad. Those were the days when shares shot up merely when his jobbers asked for their price and everybody connected to his company, Growmore, walked around with a terrific swagger.It was the need to show off that did him in again. When State Bank of India first discovered Rs 660 crore worth of missing SGL receipts, it was more keen on recovering the money and hushing up the matter. It was Harshad Mehta's insistence on driving up to the bank in his flashy Toyota Lexus,that attracted the attention of curious staffers who quickly linked his visit to the tense and hectic activity by the Vigilance Department. The rest, as they say, is history.Unlike most other brokers in the business, Harshad's has been a genuine rags-to-riches-to-notoriety story. He always gambled big and often lost everything before bouncing back again. Even after the scam, he never stopped dreaming; while in jail he was working on plans to make a splash in the real estate business.Flash forward to 1997. Harshad was back again. This time he gatecrashed the newspaper business in the avatar of an investment guru. A personalised web-site to disseminate tips and half a dozen newspaper columns were enough to set the market buzzing again. His friendly media brokers fixed his columns by peddling the theory that circulation would soar as Harshad's charisma had investors rushing to buy up their newspapers. They also argued that Harshad was merely a scam-accused - he had never been convicted. The suggestionwas that he never would be.As usual, Harshad could not resist a shortcut to the heady days of 1992. Instead of establishing himself as a serious investment analyst he went back to his old ways of rigging up shares to unsustainable levels. This time, however, things were different. The speculators who acted on his tips were wary, so were brokers who traded on his behalf. Even the industrialists who were clearly in league with him were not confident and he did not have the endless supply of bank funds to sustain his rigging. Finally, in June 1998, the bottom fell out and led to a clumsily hushed up payment scandal on the Bombay Stock Exchange.Justice M.S. Rane's conviction of Harshad Mehta, in the relatively minor, Rs 38-crore Maruti Udyog case, has dealt him a bigger blow than he or his friends would be willing to admit. He is no long merely main accused in the Securities Scam, he is convicted. This will make it that much more difficult to hit the headlines again - but not impossible.
