There is a question that India's financial regulators have not publicly asked, and the market has not publicly answered: how did a fund that most people in Mumbai's financial district have never heard of end up owning a slice of the most powerful exchange infrastructure in the country?
The fund is called Soach Global Opportunities Fund. The asset is the National Stock Exchange of India. The year was 2016. The price was ₹59.25 crore.
At current private market valuations, that stake is worth somewhere between ₹1,200 crore and ₹1,400 crore. That is not a typo.
This is Part III of The Mauritius Files.
The Seller, the Sale, and the Silence
To understand the Soach transaction, you must first understand who was selling — and why.
IFCI Ltd, the government-owned NBFC under the Ministry of Finance, had been a founding-era stakeholder in NSE. It was not a reluctant seller. By 2016, IFCI was carrying gross NPAs in the thousands of crores. Its capital adequacy was under pressure. Selling high-value, illiquid holdings was the cleanest way to generate liquidity without triggering a political firestorm. NSE equity was among the most prized assets on its books.
IFCI had been signalling its intent to monetise the NSE stake since at least 2014, and executed multiple staggered exits over the years that followed. In April 2016, it sold 1,50,000 shares of NSE to Soach Global Opportunities Fund for approximately ₹59.25 crore — translating to roughly ₹3,950 per share.
How did IFCI decided it had to sell the stake to the Hong Kong Fund?
The transaction was disclosed. The price was disclosed. The buyer's name was disclosed. Everything else, however, was not.
Meet Soach Global — If You Can
Soach Global Corporation Limited describes itself as a "young and dynamic Hong Kong based group with interests in fund management and advisory."
Its founder and director is Anubhav Dayal, a banker who previously worked with HSBC and Société Générale Private Banking in Asia, where his focus was — notably — high-net-worth individuals and families of Indian subcontinent origin based in North Asia.
The NSE investment was made not by Soach Global directly, but through its flagship vehicle: Soach Global Opportunities Fund, a closed-end, multi-strategy fund domiciled in Mauritius and authorised by the Financial Services Commission of Mauritius under Section 97 of the Securities Act 2005.
On its website, the fund describes itself as investing “in financial instruments which allow investors access to different investment techniques with different risk profiles, which are active in different countries, geographical markets or economic sectors throughout the world.”
This is the kind of language that is precise and opaque simultaneously. It tells you everything about the mechanism and nothing about the money. Email sent to Socah Global on the address given on its website remained unanswered.
The query sought reply on how Soach Global Opportunities Fund acquired 1,50,000 NSE shares from IFCI for ₹59.25 crore? Who are the categories of LP investors (family offices, institutions, individuals, funds)? Are any investors Indian residents, Indian entities, or India-connected beneficial owners? How was the investment opportunity sourced? Did any intermediary introduce IFCI or the transaction? Did any Soach principal have prior personal/professional relationship with IFCI, NSE, or advisers? Would Soach voluntarily disclose beneficial ownership categories? There has been no reply.
The Mauritius Architecture — By Design, Not Accident
Funds structured through Mauritius are not inherently suspicious. Dozens of globally recognised institutions — pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, major asset managers — use Mauritius as a jurisdiction for routing investments into India. It has historically offered treaty-based tax efficiencies and a well-regulated financial services environment.
But there is a structural feature of Mauritius-based closed-end funds that deserves specific attention here: they are not required to publicly disclose the identity of their limited partner investors. When a fund raises capital from individuals or family offices through a private placement mechanism, those investors remain invisible to the public record — and, depending on their size, can remain invisible to Indian regulators as well.
The Soach Global Opportunities Fund sits squarely within this category. It is structured as a privately placed, closed-end vehicle. It targets "professional investors." Under Mauritius law, such funds carry minimal public disclosure obligations by design.
This is not illegal. This is the point.
What the Filings Say — and What They Don't
When you follow the trail through Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) registries for Soach-linked entities, a pattern emerges.
Across multiple filings, the ownership chain terminates not at an institution or a named corporate parent — but at what the LEI system classifies as "NATURAL_PERSONS." In plain terms: the ownership, at its apex, is attributed to individual human beings. No parent company is named. No institutional backer is identified.
This is structurally significant. Funds backed by large, identifiable institutions — think Temasek, General Atlantic, all of whom have also held NSE stakes — disclose their ownership chains. Their capital sources are known. Their beneficial ownership is not a mystery. Soach's is.
When SEBI receives disclosures from foreign portfolio investors or offshore fund entities transacting in Indian assets, it typically sees the fund entity itself. Under the regulatory architecture that existed in 2016, granular look-through to underlying beneficial owners was not mandated for funds below certain concentration thresholds. Soach Global Opportunities Fund, with its specific stake size, would have fallen below the thresholds that would have triggered enhanced disclosure requirements.
The result: a transaction touching one of India's most systemically important financial institutions passed through a structure where the ultimate sources of capital are, to this day, not publicly known.
The Clientele Profile — A Detail Worth Noting
Anubhav Dayal's own LinkedIn profile, in describing his previous role at a private bank in Hong Kong, states that he was "responsible for growth of business from High Net Worth clients/Professional Investors; primarily of Indian Sub-Continent origin; based in North Asia."
This is relevant context, not an allegation. It describes the professional ecosystem within which Soach Global was built — a network of affluent individuals of Indian origin, living outside India, managing capital across jurisdictions.
Whether any of those individuals, or individuals connected to that network, are among the limited partners of Soach Global Opportunities Fund is not known. No public filing reveals this. No regulatory disclosure names them.
That is precisely the question that hangs over this story.
A Vehicle, Not a Firm
The more closely you examine Soach Global's structure, the less it resembles a traditional investment firm deploying its own capital and the more it resembles what the industry calls a Special Purpose Vehicle — an entity designed to aggregate money from multiple sources and deploy it into specific opportunities.
The fund structure is a multi-strategy, closed-end vehicle. It pools capital. It deploys it opportunistically. It has executed similar deals in other Indian financial infrastructure — including a reported stake in NSDL e-Governance through comparable structuring.
This is not unusual in the world of private markets. But it raises a question that goes beyond Soach specifically: when a pooled, offshore vehicle with undisclosed investors acquires equity in India's primary stock exchange infrastructure — which touches millions of retail investors, processes trillions in daily settlements, and operates under the oversight of a national regulator — should the identity of the ultimate capital providers remain a private matter?
The Numbers That Tell the Story
NSE's private market share price in 2016, at the time of the Soach transaction, reflected a company valued at roughly ₹17,000-18,000 crore. Today, private market transactions in NSE equity have implied valuations ranging from ₹4 lakh crore to over ₹5 lakh crore.
Following a 4:1 bonus share issue in May 2024, the post-adjusted price trajectory has placed NSE among the most valuable unlisted companies in India. As of April 2026, secondary market participants have been transacting NSE shares at prices implying a total company valuation in the ₹4.75-5 lakh crore range.
The 1,50,000 shares acquired by Soach for ₹59.25 crore in 2016 — adjusted for the bonus and current secondary market pricing — imply a current mark-to-market value of between ₹1,200 crore and ₹1,400 crore.
That is a return of approximately 20-23 times on invested capital, in under a decade, in a single position.
For comparison: Fairfax India, the publicly listed investment vehicle of Prem Watsa, also held NSE shares and disclosed its investment cost and exit proceeds explicitly in its quarterly filings. Its gain on the NSE position — also remarkable — was visible, traceable, and reported to a public market.
Soach's gain is visible only in aggregate. The beneficiaries are not.
The Uncomfortable Arithmetic of Access
There is one question this story cannot answer — but must ask.
NSE equity in 2016 was not available on any open market. It was not listed. It was not traded on any exchange. Secondary transactions happened through bilateral negotiations, typically involving existing institutional shareholders exiting their positions.
How does a relatively low-profile, newly established Hong Kong-headquartered fund — one not previously known for large-ticket Indian financial sector investments — find itself at the table for a bilateral stake sale in the NSE?
Access to such transactions is not random. It requires relationships: with the seller's management or board, with intermediaries who broker such deals, with advisors who know when an institutional seller is looking to exit. It requires, in the parlance of private markets, being "in the room."
Who put Soach in the room?
The answer to that question, if it exists in any public document, has not surfaced.
The Regulatory Gap That Made This Possible
This story is not, on its face, about illegality. No regulator has alleged wrongdoing in this transaction. IFCI's sale of NSE shares was part of a publicly disclosed, multi-year divestment programme. The price was not demonstrably below market — it was, in fact, slightly above what IFCI had received in prior tranches.
The story is about something more structural: the gap between what is legal and what is transparent.
India's regulatory architecture for offshore investment vehicles in 2016 was built around tracking fund-level positions, not beneficial-owner-level capital flows. SEBI's enhanced disclosure requirements for Foreign Portfolio Investors — which began requiring look-through beneficial ownership data for large concentrated positions — came years later, and apply primarily to listed company shareholding above specific thresholds.
An unlisted company. A Mauritius fund. A bilateral trade. A seller under balance sheet pressure. Each element, individually, falls within legal and regulatory norms. Together, they constitute a structure through which substantial wealth was generated from Indian financial infrastructure, by capital whose origins are unknown to the Indian public.
Whether that matters is a question for regulators, lawmakers, and citizens of a country where 12.7 crore investors trust that exchange every trading day.
What Soach Is — and Isn't
To be precise about what this investigation establishes and what it does not:
What is established: Soach Global Opportunities Fund is a Mauritius-domiciled, privately placed, closed-end fund that acquired 1,50,000 shares of NSE from IFCI in April 2016 for ₹59.25 crore. Its beneficial ownership is attributed, in regulatory filings, to natural persons not publicly identified. The fund was built around a network of HNI clients of Indian subcontinent origin based in Asia. The investment has appreciated dramatically.
What is not established: the identity of the fund's limited partner investors; whether any Indian residents or entities are among them; whether the capital sourced for this transaction was of Indian origin routed through an offshore structure; and whether access to the transaction was facilitated by relationships with the seller or with Indian institutional intermediaries.
These are not small questions. They are questions that a full regulatory inquiry, with subpoena powers and access to Mauritius fund filings, could potentially answer.
The Final Question
India's NSE processes approximately ₹300-400 lakh crore in equity and derivative transactions annually. It is, for all practical purposes, the central nervous system of the country's capital markets. Its shareholders — whoever they are — hold equity in an institution that is too systemically important to be allowed to fail and, because it remains unlisted, too opaque to be fully scrutinised.
When a government-linked institution sold shares in that exchange to a Mauritius fund whose investors are unknown, the transaction completed without public inquiry. The gain from that investment has compounded, year over year, into a sum that would rank among the more significant wealth creation events in Indian private markets over the past decade.
Somewhere, someone is counting that money. We just don't know who.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Also Read:
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Part One | SHADOWS THAT HIJACKED INDIA'S ₹5 LAKH CR. EMPIRE
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Part Two | THE MAURITIUS FILES: THE BENAMI SHADOWS |
