Rakesh Saxena - Charges Against Saxena

Charges Against Saxena

Saxena has been accused of many things but has not convicted of anything yet.

In India, Saxena has been accused of culpable homicide, extortion, uttering death threats and cheating in the death of biscuit tycoon Rajan Pillai. Those allegations were laid after the tycoon's widow accused Saxena and three others of conspiring to kill her husband. Pillai was introduced to Saxena by some prominent Indian power brokers, including Chandraswani. The tycoon's widow, former model Nina Pillai, was considered very close to Saxena by people who saw her often at Saxena's Bangkok residence. Former bank officials in Thailand have claimed that Nina Pillai continued to be financed by Saxena after her husband's death.

The Government of Thailand accuse Saxena embezzling $88 million from the Bangkok Bank of Commerce (BBC) and sought his extradition from Canada. The bank had separately filed civil proceedings against Saxena. He has filed a counter-suit.

The collapse of the BBC was one of the first dominoes in a financial crisis that spread across Asia, shaking the world economy in 1997. While some blame Saxena for sparking the inferno - The Wall Street Journal described him as the "Mrs. Leary's cow of the global financial crisis" - he is not facing court action on that score. He is also linked to some of the major hedge fund problems of the late 1990s, particularly problems linked to third world bonds and leveraged currency and interest rate derivatives on such bonds and to problems now associated with Russian and East Europe privatizations of the Yeltsin era.

No charges were laid in the ill-fated Sierra Leone affair. The British Parliament's Report of the Sierra Leone Arms Investigation concluded that the purchase of weapons with Saxena's money only technically broke a United Nations embargo and that Canada was not yet enforcing the embargo.