Ex-Zilingo CEO Ankiti Bose Hiked Her Salary 10X Without Approval, Made "Unexplained Payments": Report

Ankiti Bose, co-founder of Singapore fashion start-up Zilingo who was sacked as CEO in May last year following complaints of serious financial irregularities, increased her salary 10 times without board approval and made $10 million worth of "unexplained payments" to various vendors, a new report has said. 

The report by Inc42 comes a day after Ms Bose filed a $100 million defamation suit against prominent angel investor and co-founder of Seedfund Mahesh Murthy for his article in the March 1 issue of Outlook Business magazine, in which he referred to founders who took money illegally out of their start-ups. In his article, Mr Murthy mentioned "one lady" who "ran a popular fashion portal and took Sequoia's money". 

Without taking Ms Bose's name, Mr Murthy wrote, "She got her firm to pay her lawyer some Rs 70 crore as fees and-it is rumoured-got a lot of that amount directly back to herself as her cut". 

On Saturday, in response to the defamation case, Mr 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 :)" 

I'm in the news. Such fun! Apparently a lady is suing me for $100 million for an old piece which doesn't refer to her but she insists it does. It's this attached excerpt from an opinion piece commissioned by @OutlookBusiness. Given that there are dozens of lady founders in dozens… pic.twitter.com/Rs5vT5qS92

— Mahesh Murthy (@maheshmurthy) April 22, 2023

Now, in its report, Inc42 has unearthed more details about the company's messy financial reporting as well as alarming information about the $10 million in unexplained payments and more. 

It found that Ms Bose had submitted "conflicting revenue figures" to shareholders and increased her salary 10 times without board approval. Of this, $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, $944,000 was also paid to Ebix cash, which Ms Bose approved "even without an existing contract," as per the report. 

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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 Ms 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, Ms Bose's representative has said that there was no 10X growth in CEO's salary. "In fact, Ms. Bose was on a 30% pay cut as earlier clarified and proper documentation exists with the company for this," the spokesperson added.