The dogs that didn't bark

Did men and women of redoubtable experience and public service, upholders of the country's steel frame and paragons of corporate governance, never smell a rat?

The collapse of development conglomerate Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) is one of the gripping financial whodunits of our time. It brings to mind a popular Sherlock Holmes mystery in which a prize-winning race horse goes missing before an important race, and its trainer also vanishes. The entire story hinges on the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time”. If the nefarious goings-on happened in the presence of a watchdog, why didn’t the dog bark? That, concludes Holmes, is precisely the point. The intruder was known to the dog.

The curiosity of the mismanagement at IL&FS, of Titanic-sized proportions