Siddhartha: A face past the espresso empire

Posted On Aug 4, 2019 By admin With Comments Off

The Netravati river that VG Siddhartha Hegde, billionaire businessman and founder of Cafe Coffee Day, mounted into on Monday, July 29, was tranquil on the surface. But beneath, the seasonal currents were exceedingly strong. The smudge of his suicide was an estuary. The sea was only a kilometre apart. According to locals, the bodies of those who fall there, during this time of the year, are usually never recovered. The currents soon push the corpses deep into the sea.Did Siddhartha, the attentive stock exchange player, who knew the added advantage of every amount after the decimal point, contemplate the site of his aspiration? Or, was it an impetuous decision? Like the Netravati, on the surface, he performed soothe to people who had seen him that morning, but he was surely engulfed inside. Did he want to mysteriously disappear, be washed away into the sea, never find work? Never to allow people to read failure on his expression, which had always necessitated success to the world? Was it against his care then, that his figure was dried ashore? We will never ever knowWhat we know from his friends and affiliates is that there had been evident indicates of stress ever since the income duty raid had taken place on his organisation in September 2017. “Two epoches after the raid, he asked me not to underestimate his mental strong, ” a friend says. “But as epoches transferred, he felt the soil beneath him was diminishing. More recently, the sale of Mindtree shares was nerve-wracking. He felt the tech company’s benefactors did not understand his monetary precariousness.” He too apparently suspected that the income-tax DG, whom he be referred to in his alleged final communication, was being influenced by a tech fellowship honcho who lived in the same residential complex. He was hurt that people he had helped and reinforced were defeating him.Amidst this, the Coca-Cola India deal to buy Cafe Coffee Day fell through, and he was very upset that the information was disclosed to the press. The short-term loan he needed to rescue his organisation was not coming through. He wondered if one BJP MP was working overtime’ to fix him’. At the same time, his father, whom he idolised, slipped into a lethargy. Things on the personal as well professional figurehead were falling apart. Exclusively the peace and quiet of his Chikmagalur estate could contain him together, or so he thought.“His wife and sons understood his fragility, ” the friend supplements. “They took care of him like a baby.”

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Like hammered ointment frappeThis portrayal does Siddhartha a scapegoat, as someone who was plotted against. That is anyway a prevailing narrative that has taken beginning. His friends, relatives, collaborators, disciples, and the Congress in Karnataka, specially the likes of DK Shivakumar, have perpetuated this path. Some may be doing so to build a defence for their own past activities, and caveat possible future consequences, but, most have used it to deftly characterise the Modi-Shah government as freezing and brutal. A meme being circulated( where else but on WhatsApp) says:’ Chaiwala killed Coffeewala.’Even Vijay Mallya applied Siddhartha’s death to create a brotherhood and a victimhood. The two were related. Siddhartha’s sister-in-law Shambhavi is married to Mallya’s step brother Umesh Mohan Hingorani. Interestingly, Mallya and Siddhartha’s debt exposure is similar, if one goes by chassis doing the rounds.In this narrative and rhetoric, much like beaten ointment frappe, there is perhaps a grain of truth and exaggeration, but were Siddhartha’s procedures, activities, desire and avarice, in some ways responsible for rendering him vulnerable? Did he do what other entrepreneurs usually do? Was he an innocent financier? Did he not work the system? Did his businesses not have a formidable political breath embrace? Should he be lauded for the jobs he created, the philanthropy and the unfailing humility he displayed? Apparently not, according to the income-tax department, apparently, but also according to wellregarded partisans like SR Hiremath, who partnered with Prashant Bhushan in the United states supreme court to make the mining mafia to its knees in Karnataka.On the very period Siddhartha’s body was recovered, within hours, Hiremath held a press conference in Hubli. He offered his condolences, but in the same breath, also reminded people of Siddhartha’s’ scandalous’ business practices and’ illegal’ wealth generation. He especially referred to his two companies, Way2Wealth( a Coffee Day company) and Alpha Grepp( apparently operating from Singapore and Hong Kong ), and expected that they be exhaustively probed in what is known as the dark fibre, or the co-location scam. He too raised questions on his investments abroad. Not numerous dailies yield cavity to the presser the next day.

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Building an empireIn May 2019, SEBI had prescribed a heavy disadvantage of Rs 15.34 crore and other strictures on Way2Wealth. As reported by the Times of India, the Coffee Day company had “used a flaw in NSE’s trading system to get faster access to the trading instruments, and NSE intentionally allowed them to exploit the kink to make illegal gains.” It was in August 2015, through a symbol from a Singapore-based whistle-blower that SEBI had learnt of the co-location scam and started investigation. Incidentally, Way2Wealth was earlier known as Sivan Securities, which had helped underwrite the Infosys IPO in the early 1990 s when the technology company’s inventories were undersubscribed.This was not the first time that Hiremath had spoken about Siddhartha and his business transactions. He had, in fact, written three detailed words( follows are with Mirror) between August 2015 and March 2017 to the prime minister, ministers of finance and member secretary of the SIT on black money, rostering 21 companies and organisations of Siddhartha and his friends and relatives, all of who were allegedly “involved in generating black money.” The characters delineated the modus operandi of the companies as well as specific cases that had created serious incredulity. Hiremath told Mirror: “Later, I also met income-tax officials and they has recognised that my characters had been forwarded to them, and they were looking into it.”In Karnataka’s political myth, there is an unconfirmed moan about a occurrence from 1997 -9 8 when Siddhartha got into trouble with a foreign company in connection with a real estate project. He was bailed out because SM Krishna, his father-in-law, was slated to take over as Karnataka Congress chief, and conduct the party to ballots in 1999. Krishna becoming chief minister composed a shield around Siddhartha and settled him on a fantastic swelling trajectory that beaten his achievements until then.The ascension to power of his father-in-law coincided with the real estate boom, the mining upturn, and the IT boom in Karnataka. Siddhartha had the acumen and resources to exploit this opportunity to quickly build an empire. “His was a typical case of friend capitalism. He manipulated the system to his advantage, but the same system perhaps did him in extremely, ” says one of his relatives.People who foresee Siddhartha operate then, recall that he not only mixed politics and business with relish, but interposed market and branding into government and governance. To Krishna’s penchant for a white-collared image, he supplemented a technocratic blanket. Bangalore became more important than Karnataka, and that is when people like Nandan Nilekani were brought in to run the Bangalore Agenda Task Force. Narayana Murthy was appointed as chairman of the Bangalore International Airport Limited. It loomed as if Infosys was running the city. Too, K Jairaj, a major IAS officer, and importantly, husband of Siddhartha’s colleague, Poornima Jairaj, came to run Krishna’s CMO as principal secretary.One major bureaucrat was noted that Siddhartha would be in the office when he went to discuss budget concerns with the chief minister. “I would not begin my official discussions as long as he was in the chamber. He was very smart, he understood what I was doing.” Soon, the Krishna CMO ensured that they did not have to deal with the man. They displaced him.According to a elderly BJP leader, “Siddhartha derived the potential benefits of a complimentary relation that SM Krishna had established with HN Ananth Kumar, a minister in Vajpayee’s cabinet. As civil aviation and later urban development minister, Ananth Kumar patronized Siddhartha’s enthusiasm for expanding the Cafe Coffee Day chain.”

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The king-makerAround this time, Siddhartha’s experience with dominance, determined him fall into the trap of imagining himself as a perennial king-maker. He quite liked the capacity. In 2011, when Karnataka BJP MLAs rebelled, and were holed up in Chennai, he apparently are caught up the invoice for their five-star boarding and lodging. There are many such things mentioned in conversations with politicians. “He was adept with political generosity, ” the BJP leader exclaims.This BJP leader was also present in S Bangarappa’s residence, in New Delhi, when Siddhartha announced on behalf of his father-in-law to implore the veteran politician not to join the BJP. This was in 2003, and the ask came just before they left for Vajpayee’s Race Course Road residence for the formal introduction. Ironically, in 2017, SM Krishna himself intersected over to the BJP. People thought that he was doing so to save his son-inlaw’s business. To attribute all of Siddhartha’s achievements to his father-in-law’s stint at the helm would be discounting his own genius at the stock market, which was on display in the 1980 s and 1990 s. He was in many ways self-made. His family had chocolate plantations.His father, Gangaiah Hegde and uncle Keshava Hegde, had forked out in the 1960 s from the prestigious strand of Thanudi Hegdes in Chikmagalur to make it big in the chocolate nature. Their over 450 -year-old sumptuous ancestral residence is now a priceless heritage property. Girish Karnad shot Utsav with Rekha in the lead, in this home. During the Emergency, one of Siddhartha’s Thanudi zamindar uncles was arrested under MISA for hindering bonded labour. Like with big-hearted zamindars, there was wealth that extended from generation to generation, there was social and political asset, but there was not much liquid money.

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‘ Everybody’s son’To a plantation life that was staid and slow-footed, Siddhartha introduced the raced, dream, high growth, and too perhaps desire of the Mumbai stock market. “I don’t want to stay under the large-scale banyan tree of my ancestors, ” he had declared to a cousin in his late teens. It was an incredible culture transformation.A relative illustrates: “When he wanted to mobilise money for his business in the mid-1 980 s, he went to the traditionally rich Chikmagalur planters and “ve told them” that they were going around 12 per cent of the members for bank deposits, but he could give them over 20 per cent of the members. He delivered and deserved the trust of the community. A cousin recounts: “My mother always said he was everybody’s son in the extended family. He was there for their own problems, be it monetary, marriage or alcohol pertained. He was very human.” By 1991, he had become so wealthy that he bought back a single story of 1,000 acres of Kudregundi coffee estate, which had slipped out of his family in the past. His arranged marriage to Malavika, Krishna’s elder daughter, only spurred him into a ocean of the largest opportunity.Every August 23, his birthday, he would journey alone to Belur Math, Kalighat and spend time watching reverberations spread and disappear on the Hooghly. His family were adherents of Ramakrishna Paramahansa and Sharada Devi. He would have stigmatized his 60 th had he turned up there this year.

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