24 February 2016 12:00 am
The hero of this story is a purohita well known for his political shenanigans. Several state-owned factories turning out a sweet product indispensable to every household come under the purview of his Ministry.
This sweet product is usually released to the market in metric tons. One of these factories the other day had a stock of about 2,000 metric tons of the stuff ready for release to the market. Say at that point of time the wholesale price of the product in the market was Rs.70 a kilo. But this entire stock was suddenly sold to a certain businessman at the rate of Rs.61 a kilo.
The head of the institution running the factory was not in favour of this deal, but he had to dispose of the stock for a price much below the prevailing one in the market on an order from his political authority.
The lucky businessman who purchased the stock had re-sold it to a Pettah wholesale dealer at the rate of Rs.69 a kilo the following day itself thus making a tidy profit running into several millions of rupees overnight.
The sweetest part of the story had come out only after the sweet product had reached the Pettah wholesale dealer. The businessman who made a massive profit overnight from the transaction had been no lesser person than the political authority’s own brother!
And this was not the first time – not likely to be the last one either -the lucky brother had collected such a windfall. He had made similar fortunes on two to three previous occasions as well, they say.