However, they were expected to post profits and to retain a certain ratio (threshold) of their assets in government fixed interest bonds. Mehta cleverly squeezed capital out of the banking system to address this requirement of banks and pumped this money into the share market. He also promised the banks higher rates of interest, while asking them to transfer the money into his personal account, under the guise of buying securities for them from other banks. At that time, a bank had to go through a broker to buy securities and forward bonds from other banks. Mehta used this money temporarily in his account to buy shares, thus hiking up demand of certain shares (of good established companies like ACC, Sterlite Industries and Videocon) dramatically, selling them off, passing on a part of the proceeds to the bank and kept the rest for himself. This resulted in stocks like ACC (which was trading in 1991 for ₹200/share) skyrocketing to nearly ₹9,000 in just 3 months. Bank receipt fraud Another instrument used in a big way was the bank receipt. In a ready forward deal, securities were not moved back and forth in actuality. Instead, the borrower, i.e. the seller of securities, gave the buyer of the securities a BR. The BR serves as a receipt from the selling bank, and also promises that the buyer will receive the securities they have paid for at the end of the terms. Having figured this out, Mehta needed banks, which could issue fake BRs, or BRs not backed by any government securities. Once these fake BRs were issued, they were passed on to other banks and the banks in turn gave money to Mehta, plainly assuming that they were lending against government securities when this was not really the case. He took the price of ACC from ₹200 to ₹9,000 (an increase of 4,400%). Since he had to book profits in the end, the day he sold was the day when the markets crashed. Outbreak of 1992 securities fraud On 23 April 1992, journalist Sucheta Dalal exposed illegal methods in a column in The Times of India. Mehta was dipping illegally into the banking system to finance his buying. A typical ready forward deal involved two banks brought together by a broker in lieu of a commission. The broker handles neither the cash nor the securities, though that was not the case in