Aditya Puri crashes Deepak Parekh’s party and Mehul Choksi’s ‘abduction’

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Editor's note: This is the third edition of Street Smart, The Morning Context’s weekly newsletter on everything that impacts corporate India. Every Thursday, Street Smart will bring you an original, reported or analytical take on issues that have the potential to shake up the business ecosystem. Surendar here. A significant development took place in the housing finance space this week. Aditya Puri, the former chief of HDFC Bank, teamed up with Carlyle group to invest in PNB Housing, Punjab National Bank’s housing finance arm. I look at what that means for Puri's former colleague at HDFC group, Deepak Parekh, who leads India’s biggest housing finance company. PNB was in the news for another reason too. An alleged plot to bring back Mehul Choksi, a key accused in the Rs 14,000 crore PNB scam, from sunny Antigua doesn’t seem to have gone according to script. It made Prince and Jayshree wonder if there was more to the “abduction” than meets the eye.     Unwelcome competition In the last two-and-a-half years, India’s housing finance companies, or mortgage lenders, have gone through tumultuous change, leaving only …