MUMBAI, India (AP) — The alarm sounded at 6:40 a.m. It could have been a fire or a man overboard. But in the waters off the coast of Oman near the Gulf of Aden, the sound meant one thing to the crew of the Enrica Ievoli: pirates.
The ship was carrying 15,000 tons of caustic soda from Iran to Turkey when it was hijacked by Somali pirates, who held the 18-man crew hostage for four long months.
The seven Indian crew members on board the Italian ship landed in Mumbai on Tuesday.
This account of their capture and release is based on interviews with five crew members and two shipping company officials.
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Roopendran Parrakat, 51, had been watching the unidentified boat since he came on duty shortly before 6 a.m. on Dec. 27. He and two other crew members took turns peering through binoculars at the vessel, which showed up on the Enrica Ievoli’s radar as an ominous blip moving far too fast toward their ship.
“Normally, you get GPS data,” Parrakat said. “This vessel had no details, no name, nothing.”
Forty minutes later the captain sounded the alarm, jolting Shantilal Harji Solanki awake.
“I had a feeling pirates were around,” said Solanki, 52, who worked as a mechanic on the ship.
He stashed his gold prayer beads in an air conditioning duct before heading up to the ship’s bridge, the designated meeting point in case of emergency.
The captain told the assembled crew that pirates were approaching.
The next hour unfolded in slow motion. A skiff set out from the pirate’s mother ship.
The crew watched from the bridge as four men in shorts and T-shirts hoisted a ladder and climbed on board. Two carried AK-47s. They fired shots in the air and called themselves pirates. They said they were from Somalia.
The pirates came up to the bridge and trained their guns on the captain. “They said this boat is hijacked,” recalled Solanki. One of the gunmen was shaking. Another man was bleeding, cut on the hand and shoulder by the barbed wire the crew had wrapped around the ship to stave off pirates before entering the dangerous waters. Five more Somalis soon climbed on board. The youngest was 14, the oldest in his fifties.
The leader carried a pistol. He was perhaps 55, thin, with a gentle way of talking. He didn’t seem dangerous. The men called him Maya.
Maya told the crew he didn’t want to harm them, that there would be no killing if they got money.
“The leader told us we are hijacking this vessel for money,” said Parrakat. “We need this money for our country. We are doing this for our country.”
Maybe if they’d cut the power, darkened the boat and locked themselves in some hidden room they could have escaped, one member of the crew said. If they’d only had an armed guard on board, none of this would have happened, others said.
A helicopter flown in by the Turkish navy in response to the captain’s distress call arrived 20 minutes too late.
The pirates held the crew in the ship’s bridge, a vast room encased in glass at the top of the ship which offered 360 degree views of the surrounding ocean. Half the men got mattresses, the rest slept on blankets. They had to ask permission to go to the bathroom or take a shower. Pirates always escorted them, one man at a time. Photographs were forbidden.
The pirates led the crew — seven Indians, six Italians and five Ukrainians — one by one to their cabins and took anything that could be sold.
They stole Solanki’s two laptop computers, one of which he’d just bought for his daughter, two cellphones, his watch, his leather shoes and all his money.
After a few days, the ship reached Somali waters and the men were allowed to call home.
Solanki called his wife in Diu, an island north of Mumbai, India’s financial capital. “I told my wife, ‘I am hijacked. Don’t worry, we are OK,’” he recalled.
His two daughters were sobbing too hard to speak clearly. “Papa come soon,” they said.
The crew did not become friends with their captors over the long months of captivity. They barely learned each other’s names. The pirates slept separately and ate their own meals. The Somalis brought sheep on board, slaughtering one each day for food.
The ship sat in Somali waters day after day. The crew played cards, mostly gin rummy, to fill the empty hours. Some prayed.
Solanki, a Hindu, kept Hanuman, the monkey god, and Vishnu, the god of gods, in his mind. “You help us,” he pleaded.
Far away, the crew’s fate was being hammered out in intense negotiations between the governments of Italy and Somalia and the owners of the Marnavi shipping company.
No one thought of escape.
“Everyone was afraid for his life,” said Parrakat.
“I can’t be faster than a bullet,” said Solanki.
The Somalis were well organized, operating in concert with other pirates in the region.
Once the Enrica Ievoli reached Somali waters, Maya’s group handed the vessel over to anther crew of pirates led by a man named Loyan. The pirates communicated with each other by cellphone, or when they fell out of the network, through the ship’s satellite phone.
Twice the Enrica Ievoli was pressed into pirate service.
In January, the ship sailed two and a half days to rescue nine pirates from a failed hijacking. Five of the nine were injured and one had been shot dead by the U.S. Navy, said Solanki. The pirates put the dead body in the freezer and sailed back to Somalia.
In March, Loyan ordered the ship to chase a hijacked Spanish vessel whose captain was not following pirate orders. They never found the ship.
On April 22, more than 30 pirates, all armed, were aboard the Enrica Ievoli. They wrapped their faces in kerchiefs and cloths, hiding everything but their eyes. They lined the crew up on the deck so they could be seen, alive, from a small white plane that approached around 2:30 p.m.
The pirates kept their guns pointed at the backs of the crew as the plane circled above and then dropped three plastic containers, each fitted with a small parachute, into the sea.
The pirates scurried off the boat to collect their treasure.
A new kind of fear settled on the crew.
No one knew how much money was in those containers, but it was clear that the pirates had gotten what they asked for.
“Until that day, they had reason to keep us alive,” Parrakat said. “After they got what they wanted, they can do anything.” He stayed awake the whole night, listening as the pirates left the ship in small groups.
Around 5 a.m., the last few pirates fired three farewell shots in the air.
“It was like coming out of jail,” Parrakat said, a big smile spreading on his face.
The captain called an Italian navy ship patrolling nearby. A helicopter circled as six Italian commandoes boarded the Enrica Ievoli and scoured the ship for any trace of pirates.
“When the Italian commandoes came, we felt OK, fine, we are going home,” Solanki said. He took his prayer beads out of the air conditioning duct.
The plane that brought Solanki and six other Indian crew home touched down in Mumbai as the sun rose Tuesday. The men were greeted with garlands of flowers.
Solanki called his wife.
“I told her, I’m back in India. She said, ‘OK, OK,’” he said.
Solanki bowed his head with great dignity, trying to hide his tears. He plans to have some jewelry made for her before he flies home, he said.
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Follow Erika Kinetz on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ekinetz
MUMBAI, India (AP) — India’s Tech Mahindra said Wednesday it will take full ownership of its Satyam subsidiary, creating India’s fifth largest outsourcing company.
Satyam Computer Services nearly collapsed in one of the largest frauds in Indian corporate history in 2009.
Three months after Satyam founder Ramalinga Raju confessed to inflating company assets by $1.5 billion, Tech Mahindra bought a controlling stake in the company and renamed it Mahindra Satyam.
The boards approved the long-anticipated deal Wednesday. The enlarged company will have revenue of $2.4 billion and over 75,000 employees serving 350 clients in 54 countries.
Investors will get two shares of Tech Mahindra for every 17 shares of Mahindra Satyam.
“The Mahindra Satyam turnaround is a shining story of determination and grit and now comes to its most important chapter, with this merger,” Mahindra Satyam chief executive C.P. Gurnani said in a statement.
Tech Mahindra is owned by India’s Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. and British Telecommunications. The Mahindra Group will own 26.3 percent in the combined entity and British Telecom will own 12.8 percent.
The takeover requires shareholder and regulatory approval.
IIFL Capital analyst Sandeep Muthangi said the takeover would result in cost savings and better competitiveness.
“It’s favorable for both companies,” he said, adding that India’s IT sector will likely see more consolidation in the future.
Shares in Tech Mahindra were up 3.7 percent and shares in Satyam were up 4.7 percent in midafternoon trade in Mumbai, beating the benchmark Sensex index’s 1.2 percent rise.
MUMBAI, India (AP) — Ajay Piramal is sitting on a mountain of cash. Yet the billionaire Indian tycoon, working in one of the world’s fastest growing economies, is struggling to figure out what to do with the money.
The problem isn’t opportunity, he said. It’s India.
“Every large investment, there was no transparency,” Piramal said.
His dilemma is a worrying sign for India. With the country mired in corruption, bureaucratic red tape and unclear and changing government policies, many of the men who made their billions here are saying maybe it’s time to quit India. It’s got to be easier to do business elsewhere.
In May last year, Piramal’s healthcare business sold its generic drug operations to U.S. pharmaceutical giant Abbott Laboratories for $3.8 billion. Piramal, a tall big man in a country that still measures prosperity by girth, was eager to set that cash pile to work. He wanted to expand one of his chemical plants, but was told it would take five years.
“The same plant could be set up in China in two years,” he said. “I love India, but my customer is not going to wait.”
India, still a beacon of relatively fast growth despite a troubled world economy, should be a magnet for capital. Instead, since the beginning of 2010, the amount that Indians have invested in businesses overseas has exceeded the amount foreigners are investing in India, according to central bank figures.
In part this reflects the confidence and aptitude of India’s maturing companies and the current malaise in the global economy and financial markets. But it also reflects deep problems at home. India’s big coporations may be cash rich but the failure to invest that money domestically is bad news for a developing country that needs capital to build the roads, power plants and food warehouses that could help lift hundreds of millions out of dire poverty.
The frustration of India’s business elite with corruption, political paralysis, log-jammed approvals, regulatory flip-flops, lack of access to natural resources and land acquisition battles — to pick a few of the top complaints — has reached a pitch perhaps not heard since India began liberalizing its economy in the early 1990s.
“If you are an honest businessman in India, it’s very difficult to start up anything,” said Jamshyd Godrej, chairman of manufacturing giant Godrej & Boyce. “Companies are going to operate where they see the best opportunities and efficiency for their capital.”
Increasingly, that’s outside India.
In 2008, foreigners poured roughly twice as much direct investment into India — $33 billion — as Indians plowed into businesses overseas. By 2010, that had reversed: Indians invested $40 billion abroad — twice as much as foreigners invested in India — a trend that’s continued this year.
There is another, unspoken element to all the complaints. To the extent that business in India ran on corruption, some of the old, dirty ways of doing things are being disrupted, freezing India’s already glacial bureaucracy, business leaders say.
Scandals in the staging of the Commonwealth Games, the pilfering of homes meant for war widows and the irregular auction of cellphone spectrum that cost the country billions has sent parliamentarians and even a Cabinet minister to prison.
With Indians tiring of the incessant graft, tens of thousands of middle-class protesters poured into the streets and pushed an anti-corruption bill onto the floor of Parliament.
Steelmakers can’t get enough iron ore because a massive mining scandal in the southern state of Karnataka prompted a court to order the closure of illicit mines that account for a fifth of iron ore production in the country.
The bureaucrats — even the honest ones — are reportedly so scared of being punished they are refusing to make the decisions needed to make the country run.
Piramal is not unpatriotic. Each room in his executive suite is named after an Indian epic hero: Arjuna, the most pure; Dhananjay, acquirer and master of wealth. There’s a quote from the Upanishads scriptures on the wall.
His office sits in a one million square foot office park in Mumbai his family built. The buildings around him — white with blue glass that flashes back the unforgiving sun — bear his own name in large black letters: Piramal Towers.
Piramal had the will and the means to build power plants and roads.
Instead, his Piramal Group’s largest investment to date has been in one of the office park’s tenants: the Indian subsidiary of the British telecom giant Vodafone Plc.
Last September, when he got the first payout, of $2.2 billion, from Abbott, the phone started ringing.
“Because people knew we had money, we had so many people approaching us for projects in the infrastructure sector,” he said. “These people had no experience and no knowledge and no track record of having built a business in any area. And yet they were coming to us saying we have licenses and approvals. That just didn’t sound right or smell right.”
Each day, they paraded through his office: The investment banker who decided to build a 500 megawatt power plant, the coal trader assured of a government coal allocation, small-time miners with pretty presentations promising land, licenses and financing.
“They’d name politicians from the center and the state who had it all tied up for them,” he said. “It didn’t sound right. Obviously there were things going on in the system.”
Road and port projects weren’t much better, he said.
Piramal also looked at investing in engineering and infrastructure services companies, but couldn’t make sense of their books.
“We couldn’t find anything,” he said. “People get greedy. In their desire to get good valuations they resort to, if I can say, creative accounting.”
Today, India’s infrastructure companies are known as great wealth destroyers.
“Infrastructure investment has become untouchable, a sure way of losing money,” said Jagannadham Thunuguntla, head of research at SMC Global Securities. He calculates that four of India’s top infrastructure companies — GMR Infrastructure, GVK Power and Infrastructure, Lanco Infratech and Punj Lloyd — have lost over 80 percent of their value since 2007. A fifth, Larson & Toubro is down 50 percent.
Piramal may have dodged a bullet, but shareholders in Piramal Healthcare aren’t happy. Despite a $600 million special dividend and share buyback, the share price has sagged since the Abbott deal was announced on May 21 last year. They’d like to see the Abbott cash productively deployed. Instead, much of it is sitting in fixed deposit accounts.
Piramal said he really does want to run a pharmaceutical company and be the first Indian company to discover a world-class drug — despite his dabbling in telecom, financial services and real estate financing. It’s just that pharma can’t absorb all his cash. He plans to sell the 5.5 percent stake he picked up in Vodafone Essar for $640 million in a few years, when Vodafone Essar issues shares in an initial public offering, he said.
He has also launched Piramal Capital, to make real estate and infrastructure loans, and spent about $50 million to acquire IndiaReit, a real estate investment company.
Meanwhile, his thoughts have turned to Boston, where he set up IndUS Growth Partners with a professor from Harvard Business School to look for buying opportunities in the U.S., in security, financial services and biotechnology. And he said he’s still planning to spend over a billion dollars on biotechnology acquisitions in North America and Europe.
“India was going more towards capitalism than socialism,” Piramal said. “I think we’re going back. Capitalism went to too much excess. Corruption levels went to the extreme.”
He said he’ll announce his first overseas acquisition by March.
MUMBAI, India (AP) — Ajay Piramal is sitting on a mountain of cash. Yet the billionaire Indian tycoon, working in one of the world’s fastest growing economies, is struggling to figure out what to do with the money.
The problem isn’t opportunity, he said. It’s India.
“Every large investment, there was no transparency,” Piramal said.
His dilemma is a worrying sign for India. With the country mired in corruption, bureaucratic red tape and unclear and changing government policies, many of the men who made their billions here are saying maybe it’s time to quit India. It’s got to be easier to do business elsewhere.
In May last year, Piramal’s healthcare business sold its generic drug operations to U.S. pharmaceutical giant Abbott Laboratories for $3.8 billion. Piramal, a tall big man in a country that still measures prosperity by girth, was eager to set that cash pile to work. He wanted to expand one of his chemical plants, but was told it would take five years.
“The same plant could be set up in China in two years,” he said. “I love India, but my customer is not going to wait.”
India, still a beacon of relatively fast growth despite a troubled world economy, should be a magnet for capital. Instead, since the beginning of 2010, the amount that Indians have invested in businesses overseas has exceeded the amount foreigners are investing in India, according to central bank figures.
In part this reflects the confidence and aptitude of India’s maturing companies and the current malaise in the global economy and financial markets. But it also reflects deep problems at home. India’s big coporations may be cash rich but the failure to invest that money domestically is bad news for a developing country that needs capital to build the roads, power plants and food warehouses that could help lift hundreds of millions out of dire poverty.
The frustration of India’s business elite with corruption, political paralysis, log-jammed approvals, regulatory flip-flops, lack of access to natural resources and land acquisition battles — to pick a few of the top complaints — has reached a pitch perhaps not heard since India began liberalizing its economy in the early 1990s.
“If you are an honest businessman in India, it’s very difficult to start up anything,” said Jamshyd Godrej, chairman of manufacturing giant Godrej & Boyce. “Companies are going to operate where they see the best opportunities and efficiency for their capital.”
Increasingly, that’s outside India.
In 2008, foreigners poured roughly twice as much direct investment into India — $33 billion — as Indians plowed into businesses overseas. By 2010, that had reversed: Indians invested $40 billion abroad — twice as much as foreigners invested in India — a trend that’s continued this year.
There is another, unspoken element to all the complaints. To the extent that business in India ran on corruption, some of the old, dirty ways of doing things are being disrupted, freezing India’s already glacial bureaucracy, business leaders say.
Scandals in the staging of the Commonwealth Games, the pilfering of homes meant for war widows and the irregular auction of cellphone spectrum that cost the country billions has sent parliamentarians and even a Cabinet minister to prison.
With Indians tiring of the incessant graft, tens of thousands of middle-class protesters poured into the streets and pushed an anti-corruption bill onto the floor of Parliament.
Steelmakers can’t get enough iron ore because a massive mining scandal in the southern state of Karnataka prompted a court to order the closure of illicit mines that account for a fifth of iron ore production in the country.
The bureaucrats — even the honest ones — are reportedly so scared of being punished they are refusing to make the decisions needed to make the country run.
Piramal is not unpatriotic. Each room in his executive suite is named after an Indian epic hero: Arjuna, the most pure; Dhananjay, acquirer and master of wealth. There’s a quote from the Upanishads scriptures on the wall.
His office sits in a one million square foot office park in Mumbai his family built. The buildings around him — white with blue glass that flashes back the unforgiving sun — bear his own name in large black letters: Piramal Towers.
Piramal had the will and the means to build power plants and roads.
Instead, his Piramal Group’s largest investment to date has been in one of the office park’s tenants: the Indian subsidiary of the British telecom giant Vodafone Plc.
Last September, when he got the first payout, of $2.2 billion, from Abbott, the phone started ringing.
“Because people knew we had money, we had so many people approaching us for projects in the infrastructure sector,” he said. “These people had no experience and no knowledge and no track record of having built a business in any area. And yet they were coming to us saying we have licenses and approvals. That just didn’t sound right or smell right.”
Each day, they paraded through his office: The investment banker who decided to build a 500 megawatt power plant, the coal trader assured of a government coal allocation, small-time miners with pretty presentations promising land, licenses and financing.
“They’d name politicians from the center and the state who had it all tied up for them,” he said. “It didn’t sound right. Obviously there were things going on in the system.”
Road and port projects weren’t much better, he said.
Piramal also looked at investing in engineering and infrastructure services companies, but couldn’t make sense of their books.
“We couldn’t find anything,” he said. “People get greedy. In their desire to get good valuations they resort to, if I can say, creative accounting.”
Today, India’s infrastructure companies are known as great wealth destroyers.
“Infrastructure investment has become untouchable, a sure way of losing money,” said Jagannadham Thunuguntla, head of research at SMC Global Securities. He calculates that four of India’s top infrastructure companies — GMR Infrastructure, GVK Power and Infrastructure, Lanco Infratech and Punj Lloyd — have lost over 80 percent of their value since 2007. A fifth, Larson & Toubro is down 50 percent.
Piramal may have dodged a bullet, but shareholders in Piramal Healthcare aren’t happy. Despite a $600 million special dividend and share buyback, the share price has sagged since the Abbott deal was announced on May 21 last year. They’d like to see the Abbott cash productively deployed. Instead, much of it is sitting in fixed deposit accounts.
Piramal said he really does want to run a pharmaceutical company and be the first Indian company to discover a world-class drug — despite his dabbling in telecom, financial services and real estate financing. It’s just that pharma can’t absorb all his cash. He plans to sell the 5.5 percent stake he picked up in Vodafone Essar for $640 million in a few years, when Vodafone Essar issues shares in an initial public offering, he said.
He has also launched Piramal Capital, to make real estate and infrastructure loans, and spent about $50 million to acquire IndiaReit, a real estate investment company.
Meanwhile, his thoughts have turned to Boston, where he set up IndUS Growth Partners with a professor from Harvard Business School to look for buying opportunities in the U.S., in security, financial services and biotechnology. And he said he’s still planning to spend over a billion dollars on biotechnology acquisitions in North America and Europe.
“India was going more towards capitalism than socialism,” Piramal said. “I think we’re going back. Capitalism went to too much excess. Corruption levels went to the extreme.”
He said he’ll announce his first overseas acquisition by March.
Saudi Arabia is ordering its mobile operators to halt BlackBerry services throughout the kingdom this week, heightening tensions between device maker Research in Motion Ltd. and governments demanding greater access to data sent on the phones.
The Saudi state news agency SPA said in a report late Tuesday that the country’s telecom regulator has informed mobile service providers in the country that they must halt BlackBerry services starting Friday.
The regulator, known as the Communications and Information Technology Commission, couldn’t immediately be reached for comment to provide details of the ban or say how it would be enforced.
It said the suspension of service was being implemented because BlackBerry service “in its present state does not meet regulatory requirements,” according to the SPA report.
RIM could not immediately be reached for comment.
Word of the ban comes just days after the neighboring United Arab Emirates announced it was planning to shut down e-mail, messaging and Web browsing on BlackBerrys starting in October.
India is also in talks with RIM over how information is managed on the devices. Like the UAE, it has cited security concerns in pushing for greater access to encrypted information sent by the phones that gets routed through the Canadian company’s computers overseas.
Saudi Arabia did not spell out its concerns about the devices, though its government is also wary of security threats. As in the UAE, Saudi BlackBerry phones are popular both among businesspeople and youth who see the phones’ relatively secure communication features as a way to avoid attention from the authorities.
Earlier on Tuesday, RIM denied that it had agreed to heightened surveillance of its corporate clients by the Indian government, as talks continue over access to e-mails and other data sent on the devices.
“We won’t compromise on the security architecture of our corporate e-mails,” said RIM’s India spokesman, Satchit Gayakwad. “We respect the requirements of regulatory bodies in terms of security, but we also look at the customer’s need for privacy.”
India’s internal security chief U.K. Bansal told reporters last week he hoped the issue of BlackBerry monitoring would be sorted out soon, after widespread reports that the government had threatened to ban the devices.
Analysts say RIM’s expansion into fast-growing emerging markets — and the UAE’s recent public showdown with the company — is threatening to set off a wave of regulatory challenges, as RIM’s commitment to information security rubs up against the desires of local law enforcement.
RIM has said its discussions with the more than 175 countries where it operates are private. Gayakwad did say, however, that the Indian government has other ways of cracking data if security concerns arise. It can rifle through an Indian company’s e-mail server, for instance, or monitor phone calls, text messages or Web-based e-mails sent from Blackberry devices.
India and the UAE aren’t alone in wanting more control over BlackBerry messaging. Bahrain has threatened to crack down on spreading news using the devices. And industry experts say they believe RIM offered China some concessions before the BlackBerry was introduced there.
“Clearly to acquiesce to the service’s launch … the (Chinese) government has had to reach its own comfort level regarding security concerns,” said Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA China Ltd., a technology industry research firm in Beijing. “What precisely that involves we can only speculate.”
RIM issued a statement Tuesday denying it has given some governments access to BlackBerry data.
“RIM cooperates with all governments with a consistent standard and the same degree of respect,” the company said. “Any claims that we provide, or have ever provided, something unique to the government of one country that we have not offered to the governments of all countries, are unfounded.”
RIM said its technology does not allow it, or any third party, to read encrypted e-mails sent by corporate BlackBerry users. (The consumer version has a lower level of security.)
The mounting regulatory pushback has prompted concern from the U.S. and advocacy groups.
U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley called the UAE’s action “a move in the wrong direction.”
“It’s not about a Canadian company. It’s about what we think is an important element of democracy, human rights, and freedom of information and the flow of information in the 21st century,” Crowley told reporters Monday.
Arvind Ganesan, who follows business issues at Human Rights Watch, urged RIM to be clearer about the standards it has for dealing with national governments, and what types of data access arrangements have been agreed.
“Governments throughout the world are trying to get at personal information for a variety of reasons,” he said. “There have to be real safeguards in place to ensure governments don’t use this for nefarious purposes.”
The UAE’s telecommunications regulator did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Yousef al-Otaiba, the Emirates’ ambassador to the U.S., has said the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and wants RIM to comply with its regulations, just as it does with laws in the U.S. and other countries.
——
AP Business Writer Joe McDonald in Beijing contributed to this report. Kinetz reported from Mumbai, India.
Shantilal Harji Solanki, one of the seven Indian crew members of the Italian ship Enrica Ievoli, which was hijacked by Somali pirates, and were held hostage for four long months, hugs a colleague upon his arrival at the airport in Mumbai, India, Tuesday, May 1, 2012. The ship was carrying 15,000 metric tons of caustic soda from Iran to Turkey when it was hijacked by Somali pirates. (AP Photo/ Rajanish Kakade)(Credit: AP) 
In this Monday, Dec. 19, 2011 photo, billionaire Indian tycoon Ajay Piramal speaks during an interview with the Associated Press at his office in Mumbai, India. In May last year, Piramal's healthcare business sold its generic drug operations to U.S. pharmaceutical giant Abbott Laboratories for $3.8 billion. Piramal was eager to set that cash pile to work and wanted to expand one of his chemical plants, but was told it would take five years. With the country mired in corruption, bureaucratic red tape and unclear and changing government policies, many of the men who made their billions here are saying maybe it's time to quit India. It's got to be easier to do business elsewhere. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)(Credit: AP) 