Zilingo’s fired CEO says she will keep fighting to clear her name
MUMBAI: Ankiti Bose, who was fired last week as chief executive officer ( CEO) of Singapore startup Zilingo Pte, has said that she will keep fighting to clear her name.
The fashion e-commerce platform terminated her employment after an investigation into claims of what it called “serious financial irregularities” and said it “reserves the right to pursue appropriate legal action”. The probe included questions about Zilingo’s accounting practices and payments to several service providers of more than $7 million that were signed by her without the knowledge of senior executives, according to people familiar with the matter.
In two interviews, before and after her dismissal, Bose denied wrongdoing and provided detailed responses to key points of the investigation. She said that the company fired her for a lack of cooperation in the investigation rather than for actual financial improprieties.
“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,” said Bose, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant who had been CEO of Zilingo since its founding. “I feel like my baby has been taken away from me without giving me a proper explanation or a chance to fight for her back. I’m grieving and fighting for myself simultaneously.”
Once a shining example of the potential for tech startups in Southeast Asia, Zilingo ran into trouble after internal whistleblowers voiced complaints this year that triggered conflicts between Bose and her longtime backers. The board suspended her on March 31 and hired investigative firm Kroll Inc. to examine complaints. Now Zilingo’s very survival is in question.
Bose co-founded Zilingo with Dhruv Kapoor in 2015 after a visit to Bangkok’s Chatuchak market, where 15,000 merchants sell goods from across Thailand. Their aim was to build a technology platform to help these merchants sell to consumers across Southeast Asia. In 2018, they began to position themselves as a business-to-business platform to cut the cash burn of working with consumers.