Madoff’s corruption and crimes ruined the livelihoods of thousands of businesspeople, charity workers, and families that trusted his sterling reputation to protect everything that they had worked to earn. Closer home, I remember the sad plight of many people, particularly retirees, who had lost their life savings in Mercantile Credit Corporation, Royapettah Benefit Fund etc. (Including my Dad)
I used to wonder, how responsible businessmen can sit across and plan to take away the money of some middle and lower middle class people and squander it. I had this opportunity to deal with this man called (pls note I did not use Gentleman) Natesan popularly known as Anubhav Natesan, who presided over a company known as Anubhav Foundations/ Plantations.
Well, Natesan was an ambitious man, who worked hard and should we say diligently. He knew exactly what the people wanted and just gave that in many forms. He promised high returns, obscenely high sometimes, advertised it and made it sound very simple and practical. Almost everyone participated in these schemes to some extent or the other. The ones with a ‘high risk profile’ (also called greed) dumped everything. Natesan had a great lifestyle and his trusted people enjoyed it too.
Natesan betrayed his financial responsibilities to others.
On a global level financial scandals at Enron and WorldCom shake the public’s trust in corporations. Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford was arrested by the FBI on charges that he used a bank in Antigua to mask his $8 billion fraud, stealing from his investors
There is no way to excuse these crimes. As the Pope noted, the only way to truly bring about a better world is through interior conversion and taking full responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. No system of laws and no amount of external regulation can fully force people to live up to their responsibilities.
Judge Danny Chin put it, “Mr. Madoff’s crimes were extraordinarily evil.” Evil obeys no laws. It is a corruption of the heart. Falsehood will lie its way out of every law. No matter how strong we make our regulations on the activities of financial managers and corporate executives, there is only one way to guarantee that the truth will hold sway.
As Pope Benedict put it, “Love is the test of truth. Ever more we must be measured by this criterion, that truth becomes love and that love makes us truthful.” Only through a commitment to the morality of love can we break the power of sin in our human hearts.
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Tilted Plus 