Musings: The Sad Story Of Paresh

Paresh is not his real name. It has been changed to hide his identity. But the story that you will read below is true is every respect.

Paresh responded to an ad that I had put in the newspaper in October 1998. In those days I was looking for an investor for an IT project that I had conceived and I had put a classified ad in “Gulf News”. Many people responded, amongst them Paresh.

When people called me regarding the ad, I asked them for their e-mail address so that I could send them the details. “I don’t have an e-mail address” was his candid reply. “Send me the details by fax.”

To someone as steeped in computers and IT as me, this was a shocking revelation that instantly disqualified Paresh. Maybe he sensed this because he called me ten minutes later to say that he had a friend’s Hotmail ID to which I could send the details.

The next day he called me quite early in the morning to ask when we could meet to discuss matters further. He exuded a sense of urgency; it appeared that he wanted to get started as soon as possible.

We agreed to meet at a hotel in Bur Dubai the same evening at 6 pm to discuss the matter over a cup of coffee.

Paresh turned out to be unimpressive at first sight. A short, slightly built man of dark complexion, about 50 years old, with a pock marked face and a mane of long, salt and pepper colored, hair. He told me quite frankly that he knew nothing about computers and the IT business but had Dirhams 300,000 which he had saved in the eighteen years that he had worked in the Middle East. He said that he would ask friends to evaluate my proposal. Surprisingly, he showed me another IT proposal that he had received and asked me to quickly go through it and give him an opinion. I did as he said. The project seemed to be unexciting and unviable and I told him as much. He didn’t say anything. Maybe he was testing me. We parted soon thereafter. He assured me that he would take a quick decision one way or another and would communicate this to me in a day or two.

He called me the very next day. He told me that he had decided to go with another partner.

I didn’t hear from him for a month or two. Then one fine day he called to tell me that he had successfully set up a company in Sharjah and that the premises were being decorated. I was a little shocked to hear that the office he had taken, at considerable expense, was some 4000 square feet in area. “What will you do with all that space?” I asked him. “Come and meet me and I will tell you” was his reply.

The office that he had taken was close by; a ten minute walk from home. So I readily agreed to meet him at six that evening.

The office, as all offices under interior decoration are, was in a mess with all kinds of material strewn about the place. We had to move gingerly over piles of wood, heaps of cloth etc.

Paresh described to me the layout of the office. “This will be a large demonstration room where we will make audio-visual presentations” he told me. “This is where my office will be. My partner’s office will be here.” And so on. It was all very impressive.

He never really told me the nature of his business and I never asked. Why should I, under the circumstances?

One day he called to say that he wanted a technical opinion on a request his partner had made. It appeared that his partner, (let’s call him Bhoopathy) wanted to lease a dedicated server in the US at considerable cost and Paresh, not being in the know of such things, wanted my opinion.

A dedicated server in the US? This was very unusual and intriguing. I agreed to meet Paresh to discuss the issue. We decided to meet at his office, now completely furnished, at eight that evening.

Since by now I had no bias or no “axe to grind” in the matter, Paresh took out the project report from a drawer in his desk and asked me to skim through it. It would give me the background to the project, he said.

The project appeared to me to be a flimsy one. What is essentially entailed was that the company would tie up with selected manufacturers all over the world, import their products and stock them and would offer these products at significantly less than the market price to its members. Membership fee was Dirhams 300 per year (about US $ 80). Members could log in to a website which would be password protected and this website would in fact be a portal where the members could browse various special offers, chat about several issues amongst themselves etc. To sweeten the offering the company had tied up with doctors (for example) who would offer free online advice to any member who asked a medical query and so on.

The dedicated server in the US was for this portal.

I advised Paresh that (a) I seriously doubted whether this kind of business would succeed in the UAE and (b) the costs that he would be paying for a dedicated server were very high and that a dedicated machine connected 24x7 to the internet was not really called for at this stage. He listened tome impassively and thanked me for the advice. He said he would take into account what I had told him before making a decision.

I did not hear from him for quite some time after that.

One day he called to say that business was booming. Based on the initial trends, he expected to make a Dirhams 3 million profit that year and things couldn’t be better. Flushed with this success he wanted to throw a party for the hundreds of members the company had. The party was being held at the poolside of a well known beach resort in Sharjah. He invited me to the function.

By now I was quite intrigued, maybe even skeptical, as to how such a concept could succeed and I agreed to attend. I looked forward to more information regarding the venture and to meeting his partner, Bhoopathy.

My first impression of Bhoopathy was that he was a very fast and smooth talker. Could he be a conman? I asked myself.

The presentation to the public was a fiasco. Everything went wrong. The projector didn’t work. The computer on which the PowerPoint presentation was kept hanging frequently. The sound system failed. I got the distinct impression that Bhoopathy was also not well versed, IT-wise. However, the invitees, who had turned up in large numbers with their families, were not concerned. They had come to have a good time and a good time they were indeed having. Food and (non-alcoholic) drink were being plied on them and they were too engrossed in eating to even notice.

I asked Paresh what were the products that he had imported. He asked me to visit his office and that he would show me. So I visited the office and saw row upon row of shoddy stuff, in appalling packing, being touted as “Made in the USA” (blatantly false, it appeared). Who will fall for this? Is this a scam? I asked myself. However this was Paresh’ business and not mine and so I kept quiet.

Two months later Paresh called me to say that he wanted to discuss something urgently with me. I was very intrigued and more out of curiosity than anything else I went to see what he had to say. “I think Bhoopathy is cheating me” he said as soon as he saw me. He seemed very disturbed. He told me that the practice of the company was to invite the public to a presentation and to try and convince them to become members paying Dh. 300 per annum. Typically they (the public) needed to think about this and would ask for some time – maybe up to a week – to decide. If they said that they wished to join, a salesperson from the company would visit the home of the potential member at a pre-arranged time, and would collect the money by cash. A receipt was then issued to the member etc. “The number of members has dropped sharply in the last month. I think the sales persons are taking the cash and pocketing it. Can you help me check this out?” he asked.

By now Paresh and I had become friends and so I agreed. We set up a decoy couple, someone I knew, who visited the company’s presentation and appeared excited about the scheme. They called the company a few days later to say that they would like to become members and that someone from the company should call at their residence and collect the cash. Paresh gave me the Dh. 300 which I in turn gave to the couple. They handed over the money to the sales person when she visited and were duly issued a receipt.

“Was the money declared?” I asked Paresh a few days later. “Yes” he told me gloomily.

It appeared that business was declining rapidly. He had no clue as to why business was going from bad to worse. His partner Bhoopathy kept assuring him that they would soon recover from this temporary setback.

Soon the relationship between him and Bhoopathy became strained. Money was running out rapidly and Paresh could not provide the funds as and when demanded by Bhoopathy.

One day, Paresh called me. He was very agitated. He told me that (a) he had discovered that Bhoopathy had advertised in the newspapers for an investor for exactly the same business and that (b) the server, on which all the proprietary software and the database of members was had been taken by Bhoopathy to his house.

By this time the company had completely run out of funds. Paresh had lost the Dh. 300,000 seed capital he had started out with. There were unpaid bills and creditors had started calling. Worse, the members who had paid Dh. 300 to the company were demanding a refund.

Paresh decided to lodge a police complaint against his partner for having removed company property without permission. The police immediately investigated. They visited Bhoopathy’s house and found the computer there. However, of Bhoopathy, there was no sign. He had gone into hiding.

A few days later Bhoopathy called Paresh and asked him why he was harassing him. He wanted to talk to Paresh and settle the matter amicably. He asked Paresh to meet him at the Holiday Inn, Sharjah, at 6 pm that evening.

Paresh thought it over and decided to tip off the police regarding the meeting.

The police said that it would send two of its officers in plain clothes who would be at the venue a few minutes before six. They asked him to come to the police station half an hour before the meeting so that the officers could meet him and recognize him. He did this.

Paresh reached the hotel exactly at six pm. A few minutes later, Bhoopathy walked in. Immediately Paresh’s cell phone rang. “Is it him?” the police officer at the other end asked. “Yes” he replied. “Get up and walk away” the police told him. Paresh immediately stood up and walked away from Bhoopathy. When he looked back, he saw the two police officers handcuffing Bhoopathy.

Bhoopathy’s wife was distraught over the arrest of her husband and requested Paresh to withdraw the complaint and have her husband released. He refused. “Pay me back my Dh. 300,000 and I will” was his reply.

After a few days the wife hit upon a counter strategy. She had the database of the members of the company and she started calling them systematically and told each one of them that the company had cheated them of Dh. 300 and had shut down. The members rushed to the office and confronted Paresh and asked for a refund of their money. This was obviously impossible. The company had no funds.

Soon the members started lodging police complaints against the company. The police arrested Paresh on charges of cheating.

But I learned all this much later.

I used to be in regular touch with Paresh during these troubled times. When he suddenly stopped calling I got alarmed. I went to the office at several different times but it was closed. I went to his flat but the watchman told me that he had not seen him for quite some time. “Maybe he has gone to India” the watchman said.

I was quite worried by now and all kinds of thoughts were coming to my mind.

I confided this to a very close friend of mine – a Bahraini. “If he has suddenly vanished, he must be in police custody” the Bahraini said. “Let me check”. He called various Police stations in Sharjah and spoke to them in Arabic. Sure enough, one Police station confirmed that Paresh was there.

When I went to see him, I was allowed to talk to him for only a few minutes. I could only talk to him through a small mesh covered hole of about nine inches square set in the door. I could see a shadowy figure at the other end. He seemed depressed. He said the conditions in the jail were appalling and that he had developed urinary tract infection. I asked him if there was anything that I could get him but he declined my offer.

I returned to the jail a few days later to meet him but they told me that he had been transferred to a jail in Abu Dhabi. Apparently several of his cheques had bounced and among them was a cheque to an Abu Dhabi company.

A bounced cheques constitutes a criminal offence in the UAE.

To a non-local who cannot speak Arabic, finding out in which police station he is can be a stupendous task. It’s almost impossible. I figured that he would call me at some point in time, as soon as he got out on bail or whatever.

He never did.

All this happened two years ago and I still think of Paresh now and then.

In retrospect, it appears to me that his great hurry to get started with a business without fully evaluating what he was getting into was his undoing. He had a pile of cash and it was burning a hole in his pocket. Ultimately, he paid the price for his hastiness.

Haste makes waste, doesn’t it?

This story is copyright © Prakash Subbarao (info@datadubai.com)