A new report says that Ankiti Bose, who co-founded the Singapore fashion start-up Zilingo and was fired as CEO in May of last year because of serious financial problems, increased her salary 10 times without board approval and made $10 million in “unexplained payments” to different vendors.
The report by Inc42 comes a day after Ms. Bose filed a $100 million defamation suit against Mahesh Murthy, a well-known angel investor and co-founder of Seedfund, for an article he wrote in the March 1 issue of Outlook Business magazine about founders who stole money from their start-ups. In his article, Mr. Murthy talked about “one lady” who “ran a popular fashion portal and took Sequoia’s money.”
Inc42 found further information about the company’s confusing financial reporting, unexplained payments, and more.
Mr. Murthy wrote about Ms. Bose without using her name. He said, “She got her company to pay her lawyer about 70 crores in fees, and it is said that she got a lot of that money back as her cut.”
Saturday, Mr. Murthy tweeted in response to the slander case, “Guilty conscience? Taking the blame? To stay in the news, a PR stunt? A new way to get money? Please share your guess if you have one:)”
Now, in its report, Inc42 has found more information about the company’s messy financial reporting, as well as worrisome details about the $10 million in payments that can’t be explained and other things.
It found that Ms. Bose had given shareholders “conflicting revenue figures” and had raised her salary 10 times without getting permission from the board.
Of this amount, $9 million was paid to Sandeep Kapoor’s law company Algo Legal and other related companies as legal fees and supposedly for “IT system development,” but the outlet found that none of these services were actually done.
The report says that Ms. Bose also agreed to pay $944,000 to Ebix cash “even though there was no contract in place.”
The news source said that “despite the payments to vendors that couldn’t be explained, Zilingo’s books had a lot of other oddities and Ms. Bose had approved/done some creative accounting to boost the revenue reported in FY21 and FY22.” It also said that some of these things were done just days before she was put on leave last year.
In response to the story, a representative for Ms. Bose said that the CEO’s salary did not increase by 10 times. “In fact, Ms. Bose was taking a 30% pay cut, as we’ve already said, and the company has proof of this,” the representative said.