India Inc Lost a Leader like Siddhartha V G

V.G.Siddhartha, Founder of Cafe Coffee Day allegedly committed suicide on Monday night. Siddhartha has been missing since Monday night.

Siddhartha had asked his driver Basavaraj Patil to be seated inside the car while he got off and walked on the bridge. When the driver did not see Siddhartha return for long, he called him only to realise that Siddhartha's phone was switched off.

As per the complaint filed by Patil, Siddhartha left Bengaluru at 12.30pm to Sakleshpur. "When we reached Sakleshpur, he told me to drive to Mangaluru. When we reached the circle (Pumpwell in Mangaluru), the owner (Siddhartha) told me to take a left turn as he wanted to visit his site. Just before the bridge, he told me to stop the car and wait towards the other end of the bridge," the driver states in the complaint.

After the car left, Siddhartha walked towards the other end of the bridge and told the driver to be seated in the car and also told him that he would return in some time. "I saw Siddhartha walking on the old bridge for some distance," he said.

Here are his last words to the board of directors and shareholders.

To our Board of directors and Coffee Day family,

After 37 years, with strong commitement to hard work, having directly created 30,000 jobs in technology company where I have been a large shareholder since its founding. I have failed to create the right profitable business model despite my best efforts.

I would like to say I have it my all. I am very sorry to let down all the people that put their trust in me. I fought for a long time but today I have up as I could not take any more pressure from one of the private equity partners forcing me to buy back shares, a transaction. I had partially completed six months ago by borrowing a large sum of money from a friend. Tremendous pressure from other lenders lead to me succeumbing to the situation. There was a lot of harassment from the previous DG income tax in the form of attaching our shares on two separate occassions to block our Mindtree deal and then taking position of our Coffee Day shares, although the revised returns have been filed by us. This was very unfair and has led to a serious liquidity crunch.

I Sincerely request each of you to be strong and to continue running these businesses with a new management. I am solely responsible for all mistakes. Every financial transaction is my responsibility. My team, auditors and senior management and totally unaware of all my transactions. The law should hold me and only me accountable, as I have withheld this information from everybody including my family.

My intention was never to cheat or mislead anybody. I have failed as an entrepreneur. This is my sincere submission. I hope someday you will understand, forgive and pardon me.

I have enclosed a list of our assets and tentative value of each assest. As seen below our assets outweigh our liabilities and can help repay everybody.

Regards,
V.G. Siddhartha