When Purnendu Chatterjee joined hands with the Bengal government to build Haldia Petrochemicals Ltd (HPL), the then chief minister Jyoti Basu asked the NRI businessman if he had a home in Calcutta.

“How will you do business if you don’t have a home here?” Basu had apparently asked.

Born in a village not too far from Bolpur and shuttling between New York and Calcutta, Chatterjee did not have a residence in the city. He still doesn’t, preferring to stay at the company’s guest house in Sunny Park during his frequent visits to the city.

And for a long time, his office at Wood Street didn’t sport a proper nameplate; instead it used non-descript A4 printouts that were pasted on the door. Functional and unobtrusive — just like the dealmaker.

Chatterjee has always preferred to stay out of the limelight. It has only stoked endless curiosity in the corporate cocktail circuits about the man, his operational style and his fabled net worth. That chatter is likely to hit a crescendo after the complicated financial deal he put together to acquire US-based Lummus Technology with an equally publicity shy private equity partner — Rhône Capital — for $2.725 billion.

The legendary dealmaker has preferred to beaver away quietly outside prying public gaze and has rarely spoken in public. That has been the hallmark of the IIT and University of Berkley-educated Purnendu.

Chatterjee is pushing 70 but that hasn’t slaked his thirst for deals. The Lummus deal has shown once again that if he sees value, he will make a play for it.

“If he is convinced, he won’t let go until he has given it his best shot,” says a long-time associate of Chatterjee. “His mind is still in his 50s,” said another.

Back in the early nineties, Chatterjee and George Soros, the legendary financier whom he counts as his mentor, had gunned for Tektronix Inc, a computer and electronics instrumentation company. The story goes that Soros’s Quantum Fund and Chatterjee stalked the company for close to three years, nibbling away at its stock and building a sizable stake before grabbing two seats on the board and taking control. They paid $20 a pop for the share when analysts were estimating its breakup value at close to $40.

It’s the same fire of purpose and doggedness of objective when he relentlessly pursued Haldia Petrochemicals Ltd in 1995 when it was flailing in distress. Many had warned him about the risks he ran in waging a battle with the powerful Left Front government that was in no mood to relinquish control. But he stuck to his game plan, waged a battle for close to a decade -and-a-half in the courts before wresting control of a venture in which he had complete faith that he could turnaround. As it turned out, it wasn’t a bad bet after all.

HPL, once on the brink of turning sick, generated so much cash after the incumbent Trinamul Congress buried the hatchet in 2015 and handed over the management and majority control to Chatterjee that it powered the acquisition of Lummus — a transaction that epitomises Chatterjee’s passion for technology, entrepreneurial drive, deep understanding of finance and ability to structure elaborate financing deals.

“He was trained as a technocrat but learnt the ropes of structured finance and the art of deal making at McKinsey where he became a senior partner, before joining legendary investor George Soros from whom he imbibed the entrepreneurial drive,” says a former colleague of Chatterjee.

The remarkable HPL turnaround emboldened Chatterjee to take his next big bet. He acquired the chronically loss making Mitsubishi Chemical’s PTA plant at Haldia and turned it into a profit-making operation within two years after finding a way to procure the main raw material, paraxylene, at a lower cost.

And now he has clinched another big deal.

There was a lot of internal debate over the wisdom of pursuing Lummus and whether it was right for HPL to aim that high. But Chatterjee was convinced that a price of 10 times the annual EBIDTA would be good enough for Lummus to service the debt taken on the target company’s books. His arguments not only garnered support from the independent directors on the board but also convinced State Bank of India to stand guarantor for a foreign currency loan.

There must be a sense of déjà vu for Chatterjee who was prepared to place a larger bet when he wanted to mount a $5.7-billion bid for global petrochemical major Basell Polyolefins in 2005 but had to retreat when the then Left Front government, already on the warpath with Chatterjee, put its foot down.

Just for the record, Basell Polyolefins later acquired Lyondell Chemical Company for $12.7 billion in December 2007.

A year later, when the resultant entity LyondellBassell sought US bankruptcy protection in January 2009, Reliance Industries also unsuccessfully mounted a $12-billion takeover bid for the chemicals giant.

The Chatterjee Group, which Purnendu founded in 1989, coincided with his stint with Soros Fund Management with which he was closely associated between 1986 and 2000.

Born into a religious family close to Bolpur, Chatterjee went to Narendrapur Ramkrishna Mission, before going on to study chemical engineering in IIT Kharagpur and received his PhD from UC Berkley.

Chatterjee had earlier worked with McKinsey where he met Rajat Gupta, the former boss of the consultancy firm. Chatterjee apparently left McKinsey after he failed to convince a client to clinch a deal he really believed in.

TCG has never gone down a beaten path. Writing code for United Airlines through SkyTech Solutions (known today in the avatar of TCG Digital) or doing frontier work as a contract research organisation through Chembiotech (known as TCG Lifesciences), all his early investments were big bets in technology. Both also happened to be located in Sector V in Salt Lake in Calcutta, his way of giving back to the state where he was born and brought up.

Today, however, TCG has a more pan-India presence, with TCG Asset Management Company and TCG Real Estate, apart from myriad ventures run out of New York.

“He is the Mukesh Ambani of Bengal. People should know and learn from him,” said an industry veteran. “I have never come across anybody like Purnendu.”

He said Purnendu had two great qualities: a humane side and an elephantine memory. He knows every mid-level manager at HPL and their wives too.

“One day I told him bluntly, you may be a visionary but are a bad manager. How could you keep that person in the job? Purnendu would say: yes we should do something about it but where is he going to go? Eventually that person would remain,” the veteran said.

An old associate tends to agree: “He sometimes fails to pick the right people.”

But he can bamboozle people as well. A Left Front minister looked puzzled after a meeting with Purnendu. “Ki bole gelo shob, kichu bujhlam na. Feshe jabo na to? (I couldn’t understand what he said. I hope I won’t fall into a trap),” the minister had muttered.

The dealmaker seems to have left everyone puzzling over the scale of his bets — and his next move.