BS People: Rajnikant Patel

Valuable commodity

Rajnikant Patel is back in the limelight. He has been appointed whole-time director at commodity futures exchange ICEX, in which his parent company, Reliance Capital, has assumed the role of anchor investor after acquiring the 26 per cent stake of original promoter India Bulls Financial Services.

Patel spent the early years of his career with Reserve Bank of India. He joined Bombay Stock Exchange as executive director and was asked to demutualise and corporatise Asia’s oldest bourse. To his credit, BSE attracted good investors, including Frankfurt’s Deutsche Börse and Singapore’s SGX, who hold 5 per cent each. BSE, which was known as a brokers’ cartel, has cut them down to size. Brokers together hold less than 49 per cent now.

But Patel had to leave BSE a couple of years ago as a result — according to the grapevine — of machinations by the brokers’ lobby. Whenever Patel is under stress, he goes for a long bike ride. This bachelor must have taken a long ride on the day he left BSE.

As if waiting for him to be relieved of his BSE duties, Anil Ambani picked up Patel to head his exchange business under Reliance Money. Later, Reliance Capital, a holding company for Ambani’s financial services businesses, was created and Patel became president. He launched a spot commodities exchange, which has become a truly modern market.

But the spot exchange has yet to reach scale. Interestingly, the group has now entered commodity futures and taking that exchange to a respectable level will be a challenge for Patel. Legislation governing commodity futures is awaiting parliamentary approval, but once through it will expand the market and Patel will have to ensure his exchange gets a slice of the pie.

On his plans Patel says: “We see a huge potential in the commodity market space. With the stake in ICEX, we plan to develop an integrated and transparent national electronic commodity marketplace.”