AKASA APPOINTS FORMER INDIGO EXECUTIVE ANKUR GOEL AS CFO

Akasa, founded by former Jet Airways chief executive officer (CEO) Vinay Dube, has hired Ankur Goel, former head of Indigo’s treasury and investor relations, as the airline’s chief financial officer (CFO).

The airline, backed by ace investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and which has former Indigo president Aditya Ghosh on board, is in its final negotiations with Boeing for an order of up to 100 737 Max aircraft. Akasa aims to start operations by the summer of 2022.

Goel was a core member of the team that led Indigo’s public listing in 2015, raising ~3,000 crore. It was followed by a qualified institutional placement (QIP) in 2017 that raised around ~4,000 crore.

While Jhunjhunwala has invested ~247.50 crore in the airline, another big name in Dalal Street, Madhav Bhatkuly, founder of investment fund New Horizon, also invested around ~6 crore.

Bhatkuly is known for identifying big companies at an early stage and was among the first institutional investors in many leading names of India Inc like Sun Pharma, Godrej Consumer, Axis Bank and Apollo Hospitals.

With Goel on board, the airline has now completed hiring of its top management. While promoter Dube will be the CEO, Praveen Iyer will be the chief commercial officer (CCO). Iyer, a former colleague of Dubey at Jet Airways, is one of the founding members of the team along with Neelu Khatri, who has been appointed head of corporate affairs. Khatri was most recently president of Honeywell Business in India.

Akasa has named Bhavin Joshi as senior vice-president of finance and aircraft leasing and recruited Anand Srinivasan as chief information officer (CIO). Srinivasan used to head revenue management at Goair.

Former Jet Airways executives Belson Coutinho, Adam Voss and Ajit Baghchandani will head marketing, engineering, inflight services, respectively.

A source said till the company starts generating revenue, it has decided to compensate employees through sweat equity — a non-monetary benefit that a company's stakeholders give rather than a monetary contribution. This is offered normally in start-ups, where employees receive stock or stock options, becoming part-owners of a firm, in return for accepting salaries that are lower than industry standards.