As the grand drama of the yogi and the stock exchange unravels at a financial capital near us, on our screens unfolds an equally incredible con pulled off by a Russian scamster in another financial capital rather far from us. Both grifts ran around the same time, both have women at the centre, and both involve staggering amounts of money defrauded, loaned, traded, spent, misused.
In Mumbai, between 2013 and 2016, Chitra Ramkrishna, then chairperson of NSE, India’s largest bourse, claims to have been in the thrall of a holy man in the Himalayas who pulled her strings remotely and stage-managed high appointments, princely salaries, and full access to the National Stock Exchange databases. Since the directives came from a self-proclaimed ‘siddha purusha’, which is the Sanskrit equivalent of ‘open sesame’, they went unchallenged.
In New York, between 2015 and 2017, Anna Sorokin aka Anna Delvey claimed to be an heiress with a €60 million trust fund in Germany. Those magic words saw stinking rich drawing rooms, luxury hotels, banks and art salons unquestioningly open their doors to Anna. By the time she was arrested, she had defrauded individuals and institutions of roughly $275,000. The Netflix series on her life is airing now; Anna sold the rights for $320,000, from which she had to pay $298,000 to lawyers and various people she had gypped but she retained the rest.
