Who owns the story
Every chapter in this dossier ended the same way: reported, denied or penalised, absorbed - and the machine kept running. So what does the pattern add up to? Perhaps simply this: a bank too widely owned to be read casually.
Remember who owns it. Mutual funds, the small investor's SIP, the pension deduction, 38 lakh retail holders, and foreign funds holding about half - per the December 2024 shareholding pattern CNBC-TV18 reported. When the stock lost 28% in eight months of 2026, that loss did not happen to "the market". It happened to specific people's retirement math.
The honest summary
The honest summary of the record is not "the bank is rotten". The courts quashed the one criminal case against its CEO and called it vendetta. The regulator's harshest action - the digital ban - was lifted after remediation. The GPS and Dubai episodes ended with the bank firing its own people. Its fundamentals remain, in Moody's words, among the strongest of rated Indian banks. Analysts looking at the same 2026 slide called it deep value.
But the record also refuses the older fairy tale - the boring bank that never stumbled. It stumbled in documents customers didn't read, in targets juniors couldn't meet, in a chairman's one-line verdict on its ethics, and in a CEO succession the market is watching like a verdict of its own.
A bank owned by everyone deserves to be read by everyone. That is the entire argument of this dossier.