It was not a pretty picture. Sitting there, on the high table, was Annamalai Chidambaram Muthiah, or A.C. Muthiah, as he is better known. Looking pleased as ever with himself, sitting within elbow-reach of Finance Minister Jaswant Singh-at the 75th anniversary session of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI).

Millions in India would recognise Muthiah as the former president of the Board of Control of Cricket in India (BCCI). But the man is essentially a businessman, the Chairman of Southern Petrochemical Industries Corporation (SPIC) and boss of a Rs 4,400-crore group (the SPIC group) spawned by this Chennai-based company. Now, he is also the president of FICCI.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the point at which any believer in fairplay should allow himself to exclaim-if you haven't so far, do it now-'It's just not cricket!'

Barely weeks after the Securitisation legislation, passed to wring bank dues out of defaulters, to see one of the tribe in such an influential position is galling, to say the least. Is this not the man facing a deadline to pay ICICI back a sum of Rs 250 crore?

Look again, and you see Muthiah almost basking in the glory of heading an apex body that has had some of India's most illustrious industrialists at the helm. Well, Muthiah certainly boasts of an illustrious lineage, not to mention an education that leads him to quote Disraeli on the virtues of being conservative to preserve the good and radical to uproot the bad.

It would also be nice, however, if Muthiah were a true paragon of virtue in the area of corporate governance. Alas, SPIC, which lost Rs 215 crore on a turnover of Rs 1,745 crore in 2000-01, and has racked up debt of some Rs 2,178 crore, is more likely to find itself among the hundreds of Indian businesses that seem to exist for the purpose of asset accumulation rather than generating any return to shareholders.

This has been a perennial problem in India, and has its origins in the way business was done in the old days. Companies brought up on Licence-Subsidy Raj found puppet-stringed bankers ever willing to bankroll all kinds of diversifications that had little to do with their original competence. Today, the Indian industrial landscape is littered with several unwieldy conglomerates that-despite the reversal of old policies-continue to take their bankers for granted, resulting in a deeply ingrained disdain for such inconveniencies as loan repayments. Bankers were mere 'officials', and all officials could be fixed.

That's how so many Indian banks ended up with all those rotten assets, loans that ended up as involuntary grants. The sums that get recorded as Non-Performing Assets (NPAs), to use the official term. Who foots the bill? The bank. But if the bank (or financial institution) is about to fail, then the government-which eventually means you, the tax-payer. Take this literally, and NPAs could be said to represent a huge transfer in wealth from ordinary people to rich businessmen. A scam of gigantic proportions.

The need for better banking, backed by authority, has always been obvious. Stronger corporate accountability could have been another solution, with every company's board members keeping watch. But in a business environment dominated by towering industrialists who put their decisions above scrutiny, even this was unrealistic.

Given that backdrop, you can imagine the scepticism that greeted the legal teeth given to creditors to get back their dues. ICICI's Rs 250-crore demand of SPIC Petro (the specific group company) assumes importance in this context. The company's spokesperson sees nothing extraordinary in it, though, brushing off the demand as a mere "letter" that's just part of a long process of negotiation that has been on for around nine months. May be. Muthiah, meanwhile, is president of FICCI. This is not just a mockery of fair play, it is a disgrace.