Will Anshumman Joshi's chequered past, including a jail term, prove to be the proverbial slip between the cup and the lip, or will he clear RBI's stringent filters?
Anshumman Joshi’s tryst with the world of business began as a teenager. Or so, he claims. Back then, as a 14-year-old student at the New Era Public School in Delhi, Joshi claims to have started a mobile reseller business out of the UK, employing a local there, and making some 300 quid as commission from various mobile companies. Then, by the time he turned 18, he claims to have started a travel business, offering cheap air tickets with a focus on markets such as Canada and the UK, with backend offices in India.
Since then, in the two decades that followed, Joshi has gone on to serve a jail sentence for something he claims he has never done, float a political party, become a chairman at a co-operative bank, change his name as per an astrologer’s advice, and is now gearing up for perhaps his biggest corporate battle ever. Joshi’s Dhanvarsha group, which he claims is a $6.5 billion entity, wants to buy out the publicly owned Dhanlaxmi Bank, a bank with an asset book of over Rs 14,000 crore.
(This story appears in the 21 October, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)