On the early morning of 21st December when I got the sad news of the demise of Mr. P. D. Kunte, I thought that it was truly the end of an era. Mr. Kunte or “Kuntesaheb” as we all respectfully addressed him, was a Guru for many of us who worked as his juniors.
Mr. Kunte came from a small town of Alibag in Raigad district. He came from a very humble background and stayed with his elder sister while doing his articleship in Mumbai. He started his firm around 1956 in Mumbai. During the first decade of his practice, he did not have too much work. He spent these years reading and gathering knowledge. He would tell us that this helped him a great deal when work started pouring in.
Around 1966-67, he started acquiring bigger clients like Aptes in Mumbai and Chowgules in Goa. These were followed by many more in the next few years – from Hero Group in Ludhiana, Kirloskar and Kalyani in Pune, Ghatge Patil in Kolhapur, Alfa Laval, WIMCO in Mumbai and so on. By mid-seventies, he had set up offices in as many as seven – eight cities across India and one at Dubai. At a time when most of the prominent firms were operating only out of Mumbai, he set up offices in smaller cities to cater to the local clients. Till mid-eighties, he would travel for more than 20 days in a month and work for 12 to 14 hours a day.
Mr. Kunte had many exceptional aptitudes. He had a deep knowledge of almost all the relevant Civil laws of the land. His speciality was to interconnect the provisions of different laws. He was brilliant in tax planning and used novel ideas which were his own. For example, in the early seventies, he created capital structure of two types of equity shares with different rights for private companies of his clients which helped to reduce wealth tax liability. For a few clients, he set up trusts in which creditors of the settlor were the primary beneficiaries and receipt by these creditors from the trusts were repayment of their dues and hence not an income. One important rule followed by Mr. Kunte was to read the relevant provisions of applicable laws before giving answer to any query. He would say that when you read the section from the angle of the problem, it gives you a new perspective. He would urge us to first read the sections, form our opinion and only then read the commentary and case laws. He never believed in giving off-the-cuff replies.
Mr. Kunte followed a strict regime of a very ethical practice. As a strict rule, neither he nor any of the partners or employees were allowed to acquire shares of companies that were clients of the firm. In 1985, he was a director in an MNC and was offered 50,000 shares at par whose market price on listing was expected to be much higher. He, however, refused the offer. His view was that a consultant should have absolutely no conflict of interest which would affect the fairness of his advice. This was at a time when there were no Insider Trading Regulations.
Mr. Kunte was a humble and simple man. Though he was advisor to many big industrialists, his personal ideology was of a socialist. He was philanthropic and would urge all of us to spend a portion of the income on charity. He himself set up a number of charitable trusts. One of the trusts ran a blind girls’ institution at Goregaon. He also helped many charitable organisations but strictly on anonymous basis. In the late seventies, he even donated his office at Hamam Street to Bombay Chartered Accountants’ Society. Through trusts on which he was a trustee, he helped BCA to set up a research fund and a library fund.
Finally, the biggest and lasting contribution of Mr. Kunte to the profession is the army of juniors that he trained. The training he imparted to all of us was exceptional. He would throw the problems at us and urge us to form our opinion and then discuss with him. During his professional career, he may have trained more than 20 highly successful juniors all of whom owe their success to him. He was the Guru to them in a truly “Gurukul” tradition where the juniors would stay at his house for many days and get trained. Although, his body has ceased to exist in this world, his soul would continue to live through all of us juniors whom he had trained.
