Morning:
8°c
The market is going down: it's going to be a hung parliament,” said Russell Pinto, the garrulous Goan who owns the business centre where I work on Saturday. He had just sold off all his shares.
Now Russell is not the world's finest businessman — his offices makes less than half the profit the same space would as a flat.
But on Monday, Credit Suisse backed him up, issuing a sell recommendation on Indian stocks, arguing “election uncertainties are now badly mispriced”.
India's Sensex index is up by almost 40% since March. But as the election moves into its third and final phase with voting in Mumbai this Thursday, neither BJP nor Congress look likely to get the 272 seats they need to form a majority.
If they get less than 200, they will need to team up with two or more smaller parties. Shares would then tank.
The Sensex looks ripe for correction anyway. According to India Infoline, results so far show that sales at Indian companies are down an average of 5% and net profits are off by 12%. For once, it seems Russell might make a few bucks.
* Anil Ambani's claim that “business rivals” tried to kill him last week by cramming stones into his helicopter fuel tank is exercising the minds of Mumbai's finest conspiracy theorists — not least because Anil's biggest rival is his brother Mukesh. The two — India's third-richest and second-richest men respectively — split Reliance in 2005 after a bitter feud, and are still mired in court cases.
Some think Anil may have staged it, others point to Anil's interest in Bollywood, in the past linked to organised crime.
But this sabotage would have been Mumbai's first major corporate killing since the 1990s. Business
may be murky here, but it's not Moscow.
* Anglophile Mumbai tycoons such as Ratan Tata and Vijay Mallya crammed into the Taj Hotel on Friday for the Queen's official birthday. It was, apparently, a first-rate event — although the theme, fusion between England and India, was only partly successful.
“The food was a bit weird”, reports one guest on the attempt to combine Parsee-style cutlets with English-style loaves.
And with only 1000 guests, a lot of Brits in Mumbai, from top managing directors to lowly folk like me, have been grumbling about not even getting an invite.
