In the ongoing saga of Byju’s financial issues, perhaps the most glaring loose end is the $533 million that has seemingly vanished from a loan of $1.2 billion the edtech company has defaulted on in the US. While it’s known that Byju Raveendran, founder and CEO of Byju’s, has been accused of siphoning the money through a fund manager to a London-based company and finally to a non-US based trust, what was missing were the characters and the modus operandi at play.
Court documents indicate the money was transferred to a fund manager company run by a 25-year-old American who was operating out of a pancake outlet in Miami. And facilitating this transfer was a London-based businessman whose family hails from Mangaluru in Karnataka.
Rupin Banker’s family was once influential in Mangaluru, where they owned one of the earliest plywood factories. Rupin worked as the structuring division head for OCI Limited, a London-based “commercial process outsourcing” company, and was responsible for the firm’s operations in India and Southeast Asia. He was seemingly chosen by Byju's and its associates to facilitate the usage of a significant portion of the loan.
In November 2021, Byju’s Alpha took a loan from a consortium of 37 lenders. The complex web of financial dealings might have remained hidden if not for a dispute between two agencies tasked with securing transaction partners. Ironically, the fallout stemmed from a battle over just $9 million.
In September 2022, one of the agencies, Benchmark Investments, a portfolio management company based in the United States, filed a lawsuit against Brett Borgersen and his company HarryMax Consultants, a financial consultancy based in Florida, for allegedly making false claims about its involvement in a financial transaction.
Benchmark stated in court that it did not owe any money to Brett and HarryMax as commission for the latter facilitating transactions worth hundreds of millions between Byju’s and Camshaft Capital, an obscure hedge fund registered in Delaware.