According to media reports, Ankiti Bose, the Indian-orgin co-founder of Singapore fashion start-up Zilingo who was sacked as CEO in May last year, increased her salary 10 times without board approval and made USD 10 million worth of "unexplained payments" to various vendors.
The Inc42 report broke a day after Bose had filed a USD 100 million defamation suit against prominent angel investor and co-founder of Seedfund Mahesh Murthy for an article he authored which appeared in the March 1 issue of Outlook Business magazine. Murthy reportedly referred to founders who took money illegally out of their start-ups in his article and mentioned "one lady" who "ran a popular fashion portal and took Sequoia's money".
In response to the defamation case, Murthy tweeted, "Guilty conscience? Playing the victim? A PR stunt to stay in the news? A new way to raise funding? If you have a guess, do share it :)"
“It would seem that Ankiti Bose was at the centre of everything that went wrong for the once-celebrated startup,” Inc42 said in its report.
The report stated that Bose had submitted "conflicting revenue figures" to shareholders and increased her salary 10 times without board approval.
It claimed to have unearthed more details about the company's messy financial reporting as well as alarming information about USD 10 million in unexplained payments and more.
Of this, USD 9 million was paid to Sandeep Kapoor's law firm Algo Legal and related entities as legal fees and allegedly for "IT system development", but none of these services were actually rendered, the outlet found. Separately, USD 944,000 was also paid to Ebix cash, which Bose approved "even without an existing contract," as per the report.
The outlet stated that "despite those unexplained payments to vendors, Zilingo's books had plenty of other anomalies and some creative accounting measures approved/undertaken by Bose to boost the revenue reported in FY21 and FY22". It also added that some of these measures were taken mere days before her suspension last year.
In response to the article, Bose's representative has said that there was no 10X growth in CEO's salary. "In fact, Bose was on a 30% pay cut as earlier clarified and proper documentation exists with the company for this," the spokesperson added.