More power to them of course, but I hope investigators don't concentrate exclusively on that 12-year-old mystery. Bofors was essentially a Rs 64-crore scandal. That figure was dwarfed into relative insignificance by the securities scam. Why has everyone forgotten it?

Permit me to recap. The nation was going ga-ga over Manmohan Singh's handling of the economy when news of the scam burst on April 23, 1992. An embarrassed Reserve Bank hastily appointed the Janakiraman Committee and the Narasimha Rao ministry constituted a Joint Parliamentary Committee. Both reports are now gathering dust. More to the point, the Finance Ministry established a special court to dispose of scam-related cases through an ordinance. It also appointed acustodian for speedy recovery of funds allegedly lost by various banks and financial institutions.

Now the real scandal: six years after news of the scam broke, neither the banks nor the financial institutions had recovered a single paltry rupee!

As far as I know, the special court has disposed of precisely one case. It involved one lakh rupees and all the accused were acquitted. One lakh rupees is a lot of money. But the securities scam involved thousands of crores.Have the investigating agencies or the custodian at least traced those missing crores?

Obviously, the special court itself is forced to rely on the investigators to do at least the preliminary spadework. But there seems to be confusion even on the most basic matters. For instance, exactly how much money was lost and just who lost it?

The loss to the banks and financial institutions was once quoted at Rs 80,000 crore. Six years later we don't know if that was reliable. (The income tax authorities have, I note, slapped a collectiveassessment of about Rs 10,000 crore on the brokers involved). So what is the right figure?

Perhaps looking at some of the chief actors in the scam will help. The set of cases involving Hiten Dalal amount to Rs 1,316 crore. (Standard Chartered amounts to Rs 839 crore, Canfina Rs 375 crore, Canara Bank Rs 102 crore).

Let us turn to Harshad Mehta. Cases connected with ANZ Grindlays, State Bank of India and National Housing Bank (NHB) come to Rs 1,271 crore. Another case involving State Bank of Saurashtra adds Rs 174 crore. It all adds up to Rs 1,445 crore.

I don't claim to have the figures for all the brokers accused of irregularities. But it seems the figures mentioned six years ago were exaggerated. At least one friend suggests that the total ``losses'' wouldn't be a twentieth of Rs 80,000 crore.

Let us turn to the banks and financial institutions who complain of being robbed. Surely they at least should know how much they lost and where the money went? Keeping records is one thing banks aresupposed to excel at. (It has been possible to trace money looted by the Nazis and deposited in Swiss banks fifty years after World War II).

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem quite that simple. Standard Chartered claimed it lost over Rs 800 crore. The Reserve Bank then liquidated Bank of Karad Ltd and Metropolitan Co-operative banks Ltd. Simultaneously, the Bank of England shut down Mount Bank (owned by an NRI). This was apparently done on the assumption that these banks had a hefty chunk of the scam change.

Now it turns out that Standard Chartered has withdrawn its civil claims against the liquidators of Bank of Karad and Metropolitan Co-operative. I can't understand why this was done, leave alone why it took five years to take this decision. Is the bank reluctant to show its records in court?

I believe at least one of the accused has moved an application in the special court claiming Standard Chartered never lost the money of which it was supposedly defrauded. Large amounts of cash, it is rumoured, weresiphoned back to the bank. It would be interesting to know if the CBI has looked into these allegations.

Justice Variava once observed that Standard Chartered hadn't been totally frank. Is it true that it had a 15 per cent arrangement with Hiten Dalal which was in the nature of a clean loan? And that it was passed off as a securities transaction because Reserve Bank guidelines forbade such an arrangement? If so, at what level was this policy decision taken? For the record, Standard Chartered has denied any such arrangement in its affidavit. But Justice Variava doesn't appear convinced.

Singling out Standard Chartered isn't my intention. I note that NHB is a fully-owned subsidiary of the Reserve Bank. During the relevant period several of its officers were on deputation from the Reserve Bank. Some it seems were actually operating out of the Reserve Bank's own offices. On whose go-by did they use their own capital to help Harshad Mehta repay a shortfall to State Bank of India? And not just that, but alsoborrow a further Rs 1,000 crore for the same purpose?

Most of us are used to dealing in hundreds or thousands. So this talk of thousands of crores may be a little tough to digest, leave alone understanding how it was lost. Let me briefly sum up six years of effort.

First, not a rupee has been recovered through the offices of the special court and custodian. I doubt if they will get anything even if the investigators move in earnest. The income tax authorities will grab whatever comes, as they are entitled to do by the law establishing the special court.

Second, let us not forget the human aspect. Several lost their reputation, some life itself. M. J. Pherwani of NHB, C. R. Kanade of Bank of Karad, M. N. Goipuria, K. L. Khemani, R. N. Kamat -- all of them have passed away.

Third, please don't think of the securities scam as dead and buried. Until the truth is known bankers will continue to shy away from loans.

It was bad enough that Manmohan Singh dismissed the scam as a ``system failure''. What iseven more disturbing is that the system seems incapable of locating the flaws and reprimanding those responsible after six years of ``investigation.''