Ajay Relan launched his private equity fund in the most trying of circumstances. Retaining his Midas touch will be tough
There are many stories about Ajay Relan. About his upstart days at Citibank in the late 1970s, about the creation of i-flex. However, the most interesting one is about how he is not Ajay Relan. This is how the tale goes.
Naturally, no institution wanted to put money in new funds.
And then all hell froze over in November 2008 with the Mumbai terror attacks. “We had so many meetings planned for the first two weeks of December. All that vanished because everybody cancelled their plans,” says Relan. No amount of reputation was going to change that. Relan was back to being in a start-up. The last time Relan had ever stared at a garden of unknowns was 13 years ago.
In 1995, when William Comfort, the head of CVCI, stumbled on him, Relan was no rookie. He had worked with Citicorp Services India Limited (CSIL, which later became e-Serve). From 1988 to 1991, he worked for Samba Capital. “Saudi Arabia was just building its airport and I learnt a lot about infrastructure lending. I was writing out cheques for a billion-dollar performance guarantee,” says Relan. The assignment after that was a two-year stint with Swicorp.
(This story appears in the 03 July, 2009 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)