The Curious Case of Café Coffee Day

Reposted from Medium (October 2019)

Café Coffee Day (CCD), began in 1996 as India’s first coffee chain where a whole generation of youngsters, especially college students, spent their evening with friends or went on a date. It aimed to replace the culture of hanging out at the nukkad (street corner) with the ‘coffee culture’, prevalent in the US.

CCD was doing well with profits growing every year (up by 22% in 2018) and had diversified into many ventures outside its core business — Logistics, Financial Services, IT Parks (it has 2 technology parks, Global Village and Tech Bay, situated in Bengaluru and Mangalore respectively) and luxury boutique resorts.

Cafe Coffee Day Founder VG Siddhartha

Life was good until one day, its founder VG Siddhartha suddenly went missing and was found dead a few days later, he apparently committed suicide citing his ‘failure as an entrepreneur’ as the reason. His suicide is yet to be conclusively proven and the only thing we have is his driver’s testimony.

So what? Even successful people can be forced to take such extreme steps.

The narrative built with countless debates, op-eds and panel discussions after this unfortunate incident was how entrepreneurship can be so hard or how the government is indulging in ‘tax terrorism’ or my personal favourite, blaming the liquidity crunch in the financial system post the IL&FS default in 2018.

All of this could well be true but let us have a look at intriguing facts and the circumstances in which he killed himself.

1. He is the son-in-law of former Karnataka Chief Minister SM Krishna (1999–2004) of the Congress Party.

2. This incident occurred within a week after the collapse of the unstable coalition between the Congress party and JDS in the state of Karnataka (CCD is headquartered in the state capital of Bengaluru) cobbled together after a hung assembly verdict in the 2018 assembly election.

Speculations were rife that rising debt might have compelled him to take this step as the company debt stood at around Rs.11,000 crores but that flies right in the face of fact that he had just sold his shares in Mindtree, a large IT services firm, for a whopping Rs.2000 crores and proceeds from the sale of one of his IT parks to a PE firm would have fetched another Rs.3000 crores. So clearly, he was cutting down on his debt and it couldn’t be the reason for his drastic step.

What piqued my interest was that nobody was talking about these extraordinary coincidences and instead was busy discussing nonsense and only trying to corner the new government that came to power after the coalition fell.

The coincidences are too startling for me to ignore, especially if the son-in-law of a former CM dubiously commits suicide with his driver as the only witness, leaves behind a contentious suicide note and has no apparent reason to end his life.

God knows what will happen to that driver, I am pretty sure he has gone incommunicado or soon will, if he isn’t mysteriously killed in a ‘road accident’.

Everyone aware of politicians from down south knows that elections are much dirtier, nastier and much more corrupt than the rest of India.

Many entrepreneurs in India act as a front for political parties to launder money (Here is a link to understand money laundering) or rely heavily on political patronage.

VG Siddhartha could well have been a money launderer for his former CM father-in-law and his party (Congress) as I don’t know if anyone even goes to CCD anymore for it to consistently book a decent profit. I know it sounds ridiculous but it is possible in India.

Its no secret how a big political party in Maharashtra treats cooperative banks as its personal bank and another party of a ‘Marathi MahaPurush’ used to park all its funds with a big business house, which till almost a decade ago was a huge name in the consumer electronics brand and went bankrupt a few years ago.

The female CEO of one of India’s topmost private bank had to resign because of allegations that cropped up right before an election in Maharashtra — all allegations dissipated from the newspapers post the elections.

There is a high probability that he was either eliminated by someone who had to ensure that certain secrets continue to remain a secret or maybe his chickens had come home to roost with the fall of his political patrons’ government.

The kind of stories local journalists and political experts narrate from the last days of the government that collapsed in July are mind-boggling — transfer rates for hundreds of public works department engineers ranging from tens of lakhs to few crores — and locking up of MLAs from the Karnataka assembly to prevent defection is well known.

Edit: Read the follow-up (Part 2) of this case here.