An Indian-born oligarch who purchased M.C. Hammer’s former mansion in California may have followed the previous owner into decadence and bankruptcy, but, unlike the bejeweled and balloon-panted rapper, this flamboyant figure appears to have benefited from the relaxed laws of an island nation to keep his assets out of the hands of his creditors.
Once the owner of an estimated $3 billion business empire, largely founded on India’s telecom industry, Chinnakannan Sivasankaran, or Siva as his friends call him, filed for bankruptcy in August 2014 in Seychelles, following his loss, in British High Court, of a civil case brought against him by an erstwhile partner, a subsidiary of the Bahrain Telecommunications Company, or Batelco.
It was decided that Siva and his Bermuda-registered company Siva Limited should pay the Gulf-based company $212 million by June 26, 2014.
However, even before the trial began, the oligarch used his Seychellois citizenship to arrange a swift legal split from his wife, to whom he then transferred at least $95 million in assets—39 plots of land, one island and numerous corporate holdings registered in Seychelles and the British Virgin Islands, including those that owned even more real estate—as part of the divorce settlement. Not that bankruptcy would have necessarily hurt Batelco’s chances of recovering their money under Seychelles’ prior law on insolvency. But about a year after Siva lost his case in Britain, the island nation “reformed” its bankruptcy statute.
The story highlights the role of questionable offshore tax shelters, of which Seychelles is a small but hyper-caffeinated example, in allowing an international elite to transcend borders and sovereign jurisdictions in order to safeguard their assets.
The 59-year-old Siva first rose to prominence in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu in the mid-1980s after he acquired Sterling Computers and sold cut-rate PCs in a burgeoning subcontinental tech industry, transforming the company into one of India’s top three in its field. Frequently adorned with gold Rolexes and known for his obsession with health food and personal fitness, Siva formerly lived and worked out of presidential suites at the Ritz Carlton and Pan Pacific hotels in Singapore.
Over the past four decades, he’s had a hand in all sorts of things: engineering, shipping, commodities trading, and alternative energy. According to NGO Grain, an international nonprofit that supports small farmers, his Siva Group gobbled up about “a million hectares of land in the Americas, Africa and Asia, primarily for oil palm plantations,” making him “one of the world’s largest farmland holders.”
Siva aimed to set up a new U.S. operation by relocating to Fremont, California, in 1996, buying M.C. Hammer’s mansion following the latter’s own loss of fortune, but by the mid-2000s, he opted to move to Seychelles and became a full citizen. This decision was followed almost immediately by his nomination as ambassador-at-large.
In a 2008 U.S. State Department cable alleged that Siva was part of a Seychellois “business mafia” that was buying land from the Seychelles government at the expense of a battered and hopelessly corrupt national economy—this, as the nation was seeking bailouts from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
Designed by Rachel Gold