The founder-chairman of the Rs 4,200-crore Café Coffee Day (CCD) chain was in the news for the past several months due to his debt woes.
By TNN |
Agencies
Siddhartha referred to Private Equity player that had forced him to buy back shares for which he had borrowed money from a friend.
V G Siddhartha, the soft-spoken, self-effacing creator of one of India’s best-known retail brands, is feared to have jumped off a bridge over Netravathi river on the outskirts of Mangaluru — 350km from Bengaluru and very close to the Arabian Sea — on Monday evening.
The founder-chairman of the Rs 4,200-crore Café Coffee Day (CCD) chain was in the news for the past several months due to his debt woes; the sale of his 20.3% stake in tech company MindTree to L&T for Rs 3,269 crore in May was aimed at reducing his financial burden.
In a letter to the “Coffee Day family”, he said he had “fought for a long time but today I gave up as I couldn’t take any more pressure” from a private equity partner and other lenders and “a lot of harassment” from a director general of income tax.
A frantic and exhaustive search for the body involving a team of over 400 people was called off late on Tuesday night and will resume Wednesday morning. A fisherman in the vicinity of the spot claims to have seen him jump off the bridge around 7.30pm.
