Desis want to excel at everything. So with the news of scandals involving Madoff , can the desis be far behind?

Before you throw brickbats at me , I present:

Exhibit A: Sandeep Baweja ( tip:maisnon) (link)

Sandeep Baweja seemed to be the typical desi sucess story . His parents immigrated from India when he was 3.

Baweja earned his undergraduate degree from UC Santa Barbara and his law degree from Syracuse University College of Law, where he received the law dean’s excellence award, outstanding graduate award, and special service award, according to an October 2007 story in Rediff India Abroad.

Ultimately, his downfall was pure greed. Baweja won a $ 3 million settlement as part of a class action suit that he filed against ZipRealty Inc on behalf of sales agents. The money was in an account at Union Bank of California in Irvine, according to Baweja’s co-counsel in the class-action lawsuit, Ernest J. Franceschi.

In court documents, Franceschi said that he recently talked to Baweja and that Baweja told him he took the money out of the account because he thought he could “get a better rate of return” elsewhere.

What Baweja did was to place high risk bet on the stock market using the settlement money which technically he had NO right to do. Given the market conditions and Baweja’s own incompetence, he managed to wipe out $ 2.7 million that should have rightfully gone to the 1000 people he represented in the class action.

The fees that Baweja would have earned on the case were $ 675,000. Evidence that there is no limit to human greed.

EXHIBIT B: Ausaf Umar Siddiqui

Siddiqui was the Ferrari -driving, Las – Vegas regular and Vice President of Fry’s Electronics. Siddiqui is accused of demanding kickbacks from vendors in return for giving them prime shelf space.

The IRS alleges in a criminal complaint filed against Siddiqui that he set up a shell company that hid $65.6 million in kickback payments from five Fry’s vendors from January 2005 to November 2008. Of that amount, $17.9 million was paid to subsidiaries of Las Vegas Sands Corp., which operates the Venetian Casino Resort, according to the criminal complaint and regulatory filings.

Siddiqui lived a lavish lifestyle and evidently hada gambling problem.

In the last decade, court records show, casinos from Vegas to Atlantic City, N.J., to Uncasville, Conn., have sued him for at least $15 million. His bank records show he spent $121 million in just three years at the MGM Grand and the Venetian on the Vegas Strip (link)

Siddiqui is a Pakistani American .

* Long ago , in a dreary economics class , I learned about the “Law of diminishing Utility“. The Law basically states that as a person increases consumption of a product – while keeping consumption of other products constant – there is a decline in the marginal utility or satisfaction that person derives from consuming each additional unit of that product. Notable exceptions to this law are money and addictions like alcohol or gambling.

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