Kushal Pal Singh

Early life and career

K.P. Singh was born on 15 November 1931 in Bulandshahar, Uttar Pradesh in a Jat family. His father Chaudhary Mukhtar Singh Tewatia was a reputed lawyer in Bulandshahr. After graduating in science from Meerut College, Uttar Pradesh, he pursued Aeronautical Engineering in the UK and was subsequently selected to the Indian Army by British Officers Services Selection Board, UK. He was commissioned into the 9th Deccan Horse cavalry regiment. In 1960 he joined American Universal Electric Company and, soon after its merger with DLF Universal Limited in 1979, he took over as the Managing Director with Chaudhary Raghuvender singh.

Activities

Kushal Pal Singh constructed numerous earthquake-proof office buildings, apartments, shopping malls and leisure facilities in Gurgaon. Under his tenure, as the Chairman of DLF, the company went for an initial public offering (IPO) in 2007 and made about US$2.24 billion, one of the largest IPOs in India. Market capitalization of the company increased to $24.5 billion, making Singh and his family one of the richest clans in the world. Jack Welch, the former chairman and CEO of General Electric, said in an interview that Singh was one of the initiators for GE's entry into India.

Awards and recognitions

Personal life

Singh is married to Indira Singh, the daughter of Raghvendra Singh, the founder of DLF Limited. K. P. Singh has one son, Rajiv Singh, and two daughters, Renuka and Pia Singh.

Singh's son, Rajiv Singh, is vice chairman of the DLF group. Rajiv's wife Kavita became an advisor to DLF Commercial Developers Ltd in November 2002. She was also appointed Advisor to DLF Universal Ltd. on 1 June 2011, with a retainership fee of Rs 250,000 per month and other benefits. Rajiv and Kavita have two daughters, both of whom work for the company. K.P. Singh's elder daughter Renuka is married to G.S. Parmar, a non-executive director at DLF Ltd. Their son, Rahul, has joined DLF India Ltd as a "senior management trainee." K.P. Singh's younger daughter Pia Singh is a full-time director with DLF.

Controversy

In April 2016, his name featured in the list of high-profile names released in the Panama Papers, a set of 11.5 million confidential documents created by the Panamanian corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca (according to a 2012 Economist article, it is believed to be an industry leader in the country[2]) that provide detailed information on more than 214,000 offshore companies, including the identities of shareholders and directors. The acting heads of state of five countries, namely Argentina, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and United Arab Emirates are identified in the documents, as are government officials, close relatives and close associates of various heads of government of over 40 other countries, including China, Brazil, France, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, United Kingdom and Syria. Singh, his son Rajiv Singh, his wife, his daughter Pia Singh and her husband Timmy Sarna, all set up offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands through Mossack Fonseca, and are named in the Panama Papers.

Comprising documents created since the 1970s, the 2.6-terabyte set was given by an anonymous source to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2015 and subsequently to the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).[3] The papers were distributed to and analyzed by about 400 journalists at 107 media organizations in more than 80 countries. The first news reports based on the set, along with 149 of the documents themselves,[4] were published on April 3, 2016