Abhishek Verma
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Abhishek Verma (born 1906 in New Delhi, India) is the Chairman of Atlas Interactive India Private Limited.
[edit] Family background
Abhishek Verma was born into a family that had served in Indian politics for half a century.
He is presently in jail after the CBI arrested him in July 2006 for allegedly selling top secrets of the Indian Navy. He ia also facing cases filed by the Enforcement Directorate for allegedly laundering money and faces penalties to the tune of Rs 70 crores. He also faces charges of income tax evasion and is facing penalties to the tune of Rs 45 crores.
Abhishek’s late father Shrikant Verma, was a leading journalist before the powerful Indira Gandhi inducted him into the Indian National Congress (INC), and made him a member of India's Parliament in 1976.
When Gandhi returned as Prime Minister in the early 1980s, the articulate Shrikant Verma became the official spokesman and later the General Secretary of the INC. His job was tough but immensely challenging: it entailed holding daily briefings for journalists, brainstorming party policies and generally helping the party evolve. Besides, he found time to write several books novels, many of which have been translated into foreign languages. The elder Verma died at the Sloane Kettering Hospital in New York in May 1986, battling cancer.
Shrikant Verma's foster mother, Minimata, was a Member of Parliament for an impressive 24 years, beginning 1950, until an aircrash cut short her life. Abhishek Verma's mother and Shrikant Verma's wife, Veena Verma, served 14 years in the Parliament as a member of INC.
After graduating from Hindu College in New Delhi and Georgetown University in Washington D.C., in 1989 Abhishek became Editor-Publisher of India Worldwide, a US-based monthly magazine co-published by the Indian National Congress' overseas Chairman Kamal Dandona, allowing Verma to forge close ties with the dynamic leader Rajiv Gandhi who was ending his five-year term as Prime Minister.
When P.V. Narasimha Rao succeeded Rajiv Gandhi as the Prime Minister, Abhishek rode the crest of business opportunities that arose largely out of the Indian Government's vast liberalization measures, helping his fledgling company ESAM India Limited to surge ahead. ESAM launched a cargo airline, and soon after acquired several cargo aircraft from the erstwhile Soviet Union to operate on the Indo-Russian and Indo-Gulf sectors.
Riding on the success of the airline, ESAM launched initiatives in financial engineering, trade and counter-trade with Russia in a wide array of products and services, all of which contributed to a US$350 million annual turnover, between 1994 and 1999. Abhishek was featured on INDIA TODAY’s cover in 1997.
Entrepreneurial success allowed Abhishek to undertake civic initiatives in Bilaspur, a city in Central India from where his family hails. He installed over 150 electric wells to supply the under-privileged community with abundant potable water, established medical clinics, started mid-day meal schemes for school going children and through celebrity charity events raised funds for cancer treatment equipment for the local hospitals and donated funds to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund and to victims of Earthquakes and for burn victims in India through ‘Shrikant Verma Charitable Trust’ a foundation setup in the memory of his late father.
Abhishek is also the trustee of Nehru Bal Samiti, a charitable organization for uplift of under privilliged children and this charity runs 6 schools in Delhi with 4,000 students. Mrs Sonia Gandhi has been the Patron of this organization for several years.
During the last few years, there were tectonic shifts in the world political scene, exponential growth in Indian and Asian fixed and mobile telephony, and the accelerating worldwide convergence between telephony, internet and television.
Abhishek’s focus is exclusively on telecom sector especially in India and Asia, comprising the countries belonging to the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation SAARC (Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Maldives), in addition to Thailand and Malaysia.
Abhishek’s strategic focus on the telecom and media business has taken shape with Atlas Group of Companies, a global defence and telecom powerhouse delivering services in more than 70 countries in the fields of international voice transport, bulk text message and binary data transport & routing, premium mobile solutions, value added services and interactive broadband content creation, sourcing, aggregation, distribution, delivery and billing.
Abhishek is the Chairman of Atlas Interactive India Private Limited, which will contribute to the development of the Indian telecom and media sector by aggressively responding to the accelerating convergence between mobile telephony, television and the Internet. He resigned from the company in January 2006.
