Subrata Roy, the boss of the Sahara conglomerate, is in a New Delhi prison on contempt-of-court charges and needs to post $1.6 billion in bail to get out. To help raise the money, Sahara is in talks to refinance its overseas hotels, including New York’s Plaza. But last week, Reuters exclusively reported that it was unclear if the man who’s orchestrating the deal, a 34-year-old former broker named Saransh Sharma, has the money to pull it off. Sahara’s head of corporate finance, Sandeep Wadhwa, said Sahara’s lawyers had verified with Bank of America that Sharma has deposited just over $1 billion in an account at the bank that is "earmarked for the said transaction." That account, however, doesn’t appear to exist, the story reported. In a Reuters Best: Journalist Spotlight Q&A, Reuters journalist Emily Flitter offers an inside look at the reporting behind the scoop.
Q. How did you get started on this story?
A. Reuters Finance Editor Paritosh Bansal asked me to look into the players in a deal to sell the Plaza Hotel and explained to me that the world-renowned New York landmark was owned by a jailed Indian billionaire whose case had garnered a great deal of attention in India. From the very first stories I read about the deal between the billionaire Subrata Roy and a previously unknown California hedge fund manager, Saransh Sharma, I could tell something wasn’t right.
Q. What types of reporting/sourcing were involved?
A. To find out whether there was a prior connection between Sharma and Roy that could explain the Plaza deal, I did a deep dive into Sharma’s background. I started with Google and LinkedIn searches, which helped me construct a brief employment history for Sharma and also brought to light a lawsuit he had filed against a hedge fund manager. The material submitted to the court in that case turned out to be crucial: In a deposition Sharma gave, he admitted to having stolen data from a former employer and fabricating an email. Digging into the case also helped me learn about other legal problems Sharma had encountered. I discovered a private equity firm had accused Sharma of forging a letter from a bank attesting to funds he claimed to be holding there.
Q. What was the hardest part about reporting this story?
A. I can’t take credit for completing the hardest part of the story – that was Reuters Correspondent Sumeet Chatterjee’s work on the ground in India. He managed to get a copy of an email Sharma had submitted to Roy that was allegedly from a Bank of America representative attesting to funds under Sharma’s control. Once we had the email, we were able to try to validate it ourselves. I called the representative whose contact information was listed on the email signature. He said he had never heard of Sharma and had never sent an email attesting to the presence of $1 billion under Sharma’s control.
Q. What have been your most rewarding and most difficult experiences as a journalist?
A. I’ve exposed secret plans to share Americans’ bank data with spy agencies; described the hidden, delicate relations between China’s state money manager and top U.S. Treasury officials; and chronicled the many dangers that await average Americans in a murky corner of the investing world, but I’m still happiest when I think about the heterodox economist I managed to quote in an investigative report about conflicts of interest during the post-2008 financial reform efforts in Washington. In “Special Report: For Some professors, disclosure is academic,” I quoted Edward Nell, an economics professor at the New School for Social Research in New York. Nell described how funding for economic research shapes the entire discipline, making a simple point that is seldom acknowledged in today’s world, where finance and economics are treated as sciences, their principles unassailable. Voices like Nell’s don’t make it into news stories very frequently.
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