Gautam Ramswarup’s incompetency at PriceWaterHouse

Many people have commented on Gautam Ramswarup’s incompetence and the shock and disbelief surrounding his appointment as the new Chairman of FSC. It is also being revealed that he is on an overseas junket now which is going to cost FSC $150,000. This is very serious.
I left Fiji in 1983. But I was a junior employee at Price Waterhouse,Suva in the early 1970’s when Ramswarup was member of the PW mangement consulting Division. I remember very vividly how he used to flutter around the office talking big, foulmouthing and talking down others and disturbing thesecretaries and other staff. This used to be his routine day in and day out- a tradition he successsfully maintained,i am told in FSC as well. He always talked low of the USP graduates.
The worst and most unethical consequence of his widely known unproductivity and inability to apply himself to any serious work was his habit of arbitrarily charging the clients.
Of course it did not take long for the expatriate partners of Price Waterhouse and the sole local partner Bhaskar Bhindi to express their grave concerns and take immediate action. Despite, many rumours of internal disciplinary action and counselling , he showed no improvement and was discreetly asked to leave. His savior came in the form of Rasheed Ali who knowing well his general incompetence offerred him a Management Accountants job-well protected from the rigours of financial accounting.
He developed such a deep vendetta against Price Waterhouse after he was virtually asked to leave , that a few years later he engineered the move to appoint Peat Marvick Mitchell ( now KPMG)as the extenal auditors of FSC in place of the existing auditors Price Waterhouse. Everybody in the accounting fraternity knew about Ramswarup’s personal association with one of the two local Peat Marvick Partners by the name of Abdul Khan who later was fired himself. Some junior staff who had studied in Auckland were themselves aware of the mediocrity of Khan as a professional person and the fact that he passed one of the acoounting papers only after his third attempt.
Birds of the same feather flock together as they say and certainly Ramswarup and Abdul Khan had a lot in common , not the least of which was their proven mediocrity.