A scam that was just waiting to happen

Equity investing in India is mostly about cutting through layers of fiction that companies surround themselves with. Now, as the Karvy scandal shows, what your broker tells you about your stock holdings could also be fictional. To all their other worries, you must also worry that the broker is going to take possession of your stocks, sell them off and appropriate the proceeds. According to the conclusion that a SEBI investigation has come to, that is exactly what Karvy Stock Broking did with several hundred crore rupees worth of shares that belonged to its clients. The shares were transferred from the clients' depository accounts, sold off and the proceeds transferred to Karvy's real estate business. SEBI has found a particularly brazen and large-scale heist, in all likelihood the largest ever malfeasance of this kind in the Indian equity markets. However, what is truly problem