Ankiti Bose

Zilingo Pte was until recently a rising star in the world of fashion e-commerce, and its glamorous leader Ankiti Bose was a model young achiever.

But the salvageable parts are trapped in a bloated firm in which Bose is still a shareholder-director, running a campaign against investors. Even before the whistleblowers came forward, there was the curious case of James Perry, a former Citigroup Inc. head of technology investment banking for Asia-Pacific. Perry, who had spent two decades in corporate finance, joined Zilingo as its first chief financial officer only to return to Citi about a year later, in September 2020. A 23-second-long audio clip of the March 31 meeting in which the CEO was suspended was leaked online. Before the scandal, Bose was preparing for a $150 million to $200 million fundraising round - at unicorn valuations - led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. It never materialized. And Bose fit the part of a hyper-achieving woman entrepreneur. A June 6 story by the website Bar and Bench says that Kapoor had allegedly threatened another Sequoia portfolio company that it could be in violation of India's foreign exchange control laws. After Bose was fired, Salahuddin - who was also suspended - resigned and wrote on LinkedIn: "There may have been several breaches of due process in the current goings-on in this matter which I cannot support or stand by." "We have tried to work around this to reduce the impact of this between fiscal '21 and '22." Soon after the allegations of financial impropriety led to her suspension on March 31, Bose decided to go to war. Zilingo Pte was until recently a rising star in the world of fashion e-commerce, and its glamorous leader Ankiti Bose was a model young achiever. Investors gave her a lot of latitude, believing that Bose's image was helping the firm pull in business worth $100 million. "There is not a single payment made by Zilingo that did not have proper documents or either the finance, tech or operations teams were not aware of," the former CEO told Bloomberg News in an interview after her dismissal.