Some business stories feel almost too dramatic to be real. A tiny workshop that grows into one of the biggest names in Indian gold, a stock that touches ₹1,000-plus, and then, decades later, a regulator's order that wipes out most of its value in a matter of days. That's the story of Rajesh Exports Limited. Before we get into it, one important note: everything below about the alleged fraud comes from SEBI's interim order , which is not a final verdict. Rajesh Exports and its founder, Rajesh Mehta, have denied the allegations and say they will contest them. Keep that in mind as you read — this is a story that's still being written. Chapter 1: The Rise It started small. In 1989, brothers Rajesh Mehta and Prashant Mehta, from a middle-class Jain family with no big business connections, set up a 10-person jewellery manufacturing unit in a Bangalore garage. No shortcuts, just hard work. Within a year they'd opened their first retail outlet, and by 1995 the busi...
The collapse of Enron in 2001 remains one of the darkest and most fascinating chapters in corporate history. Often referred to as "The Smartest Guys in the Room," Enron's executives built a towering empire not on solid business fundamentals, but on a foundation of greed, aggressive accounting loopholes, and catastrophic auditor complicity. For finance professionals, investors, and auditors alike, Enron is the ultimate cautionary tale of what happens when ethics are sacrificed for stock prices. To truly understand how a $100 billion company went bankrupt in a matter of months, we have to look under the hood of their business model, their accounting magic, and the institutional failures that allowed it to happen. The Business Evolution: From Pipelines to a "Trading Bank" Founded in 1985 by Kenneth Lay, Enron started as a traditional, asset-heavy natural gas pipeline company. However, the true transformation began when Lay hired Jeffrey Skilling, a brilliant former...