Why Singapore Never Heard Her: The Question Ankiti Bose Still Has Not Answered

Ankiti Bose wants the world to treat a March 2021 allegation as if it were settled history: that her co-founder Dhruv Kapoor and then-COO Aadi Vaidya demanded sexual favours, threatened her job, called at odd hours, and told her she would be sacked unless she met them in a hotel room. That is what Economic Times reported after reviewing the FIR she later filed in Mumbai.

The allegation is grave. If it happened, it happened inside a Singapore-headquartered company, while Bose lived and worked in Singapore, and while Zilingo Pte Ltd sat under Singapore law. The public record then produces a fact that no amount of victim-language can dissolve: she did not put that allegation through Singapore’s criminal or workplace-harassment machinery. She waited until 23 April 2024, walked into Kasturba Marg Police Station in Borivali East, Mumbai, and filed an Indian FIR under IPC Sections 354A and 354D.

That is the entire case. Not a mood. A sequence.

The geography she keeps trying to talk past

Zilingo was not an Indian kirana stall with a Singapore letterhead. It was founded in Singapore in 2015 by Bose and Kapoor. Bose lived and worked there from 2016. The company raised about US$308 million, including a 2019 Series D of US$226 million that took the valuation to roughly US$970 million, with Temasek, Sequoia India, Burda and Sofina on the cap table. At its peak it employed hundreds across eight countries. It entered liquidation in early 2023 after the board appointed EY as provisional liquidator and sold technology assets.

The people she later named as sexual predators were colleagues inside that Singapore company. The alleged March 2021 demand was, on her own telling, tied to her remaining CEO of that company. The later FIR even stretches alleged conduct through to October 2023 — well after she had been fired, and while she was still based in Singapore.

Singapore is not a legal vacuum. A resident who says she was sexually harassed, stalked, threatened with sack, and targeted with lewd or violent material from disappearing accounts has, on the government’s own published routes:

• a police report, including an online police report, for offences under the Protection from Harassment Act 2014 and the Penal Code;
• TAFEP advice and a workplace-harassment report;
• a Protection Order or Expedited Protection Order in the Protection from Harassment Court;
• a civil claim for damages;
• a Magistrate’s Complaint.

POHA simplified claims can be filed within two years of the event. Police reports do not require a flight to Borivali. They require a complainant who is in the jurisdiction and willing to put the allegation on a Singapore file.

No reliable public reporting identifies a Singapore Police complaint, a POHA application, a TAFEP workplace-harassment proceeding, or a Protection from Harassment Court case filed by Bose over the March 2021 demand. That is not the same as proving a confidential report never existed. It is the same as saying the public case she now waves as a shield was built in Mumbai, not in the city where she said she was trapped.

The explanation that insults the reader’s intelligence

When the FIR was registered, the delay was explained in the most bureaucratic way imaginable: she had taken a new job in Singapore and therefore could not travel to Mumbai earlier to lodge a formal complaint. NDTV Profit recorded that explanation. Economic Times recorded a similar version: after she resigned her directorships in June 2022 she took a new job, was busy, and did not get leave to file.

Read that again, slowly.

The alleged crime, on her account, was committed in and around a Singapore company by men who worked with her in that company. She was living in Singapore. Her reason for not filing in India was that she was employed in Singapore. The one place she does not explain is the place she was standing.

A new job can delay a flight. It does not disable a police portal. It does not lock the Protection from Harassment Court. It does not prevent a lawyer in Raffles Place from putting a statement on record. Bose had already found lawyers in 2022; Business Today reported an April 2022 legal notice to the Zilingo board alleging harassment, fake-account threats from 28 August 2020, rape-video and Pornhub material, and that Kapoor and Vaidya “did not help her.” That notice even said she was “extremely distraught, scared to leave Singapore.”

Scared to leave Singapore — and then, two years later, the official story becomes: Singapore work prevented her from going to India to complain. The sentence collapses under its own weight. If Singapore was the cage, Singapore was also the courthouse.

The timeline that will not be sentimentalised

Strip the adjectives. Keep the dates.

• 28 August 2020 (as later described in her 2022 legal notice): alleged threats from fake or disappearing accounts, including violent sexual material. She says Kapoor and Vaidya knew and did not help.
• March 2021 (as later described in the 2024 FIR): alleged demand for sexual favours tied to her remaining CEO; alleged odd-hour calls; alleged hotel-room demand. ET quoted the FIR: they “threatened me that they would sack me if I don’t extend sexual favours to them and meet them in a hotel room.”
• 31 March 2022: Zilingo board suspends her as CEO after complaints of financial irregularities during a fundraising process. Kroll is engaged.
• Around 11 April 2022 (company position): Bose first formally raises harassment-related issues of past periods with the board. The company said those issues surfaced after suspension. Her camp has said concerns were raised earlier, including around August 2021. That dispute has never been resolved by a public judgment.
• 26 April 2022: legal notice to the board, reported by Business Today.
• 20 May 2022: terminated “with cause” after the Kroll-led investigation into “serious financial irregularities.” Mint reported that the termination letter cited insubordination, neglect of duties, failure to produce documents, failure to present herself for questioning, breach of employment agreement and breakdown of trust — and that it did not, on that reporting, accuse her of a completed fraud charge in the letter itself. The full Kroll report was never released. Bose denied wrongdoing and called the process a witch hunt.
• June 2022: she resigns remaining directorships, citing “opacity of information.”
• January–February 2023: Zilingo’s technology assets are sold; liquidation begins. A company that had raised more than US$300 million is wound down.
• 23 April 2024: first public criminal FIR in Mumbai, FIR described in national media as six to eight pages, against Kapoor and Vaidya, IPC 354A and 354D plus a narrative of cheating, intimidation, share coercion and online targeting. That is roughly 23 months after termination and about three years after the alleged March 2021 demand.

Kapoor’s public response was not subtle. He called the allegations “completely baseless, untrue and malicious” and “retaliatory,” and pointed to the investigation that preceded her removal. Vaidya called them “a clear afterthought” intended to harm his reputation. Those are denials, not verdicts. They are also part of the record.

Through mid-2026, national reporting still recorded no public charge-sheet, no arrest, and no trial verdict on the sexual-harassment FIR. A registered FIR is a fact. An untried FIR is not a conviction. Treating it as a moral trophy while refusing the jurisdiction where the alleged acts sat is not courage. It is forum shopping with a halo.

What Singapore would have forced her to do

This is the part advocates of the Mumbai filing never want examined.

A Singapore police file, a POHA claim, or a Protection Order application would have required particulars in the jurisdiction that housed the company, the employment relationship, and — on her own 2022 notice — her physical fear. Investigators would have been able to ask for devices, internal Slack or email, hotel records if a hotel was named, call logs for the “odd hours,” and contemporaneous complaints to HR or the board. The Protection from Harassment Court is built for stalking, indecent communications, and courses of conduct. TAFEP exists specifically so a worker does not have to wait two years for leave to fly to another country.

India’s IPC 354A and 354D are real offences. They are also offences that, in this fact pattern, require a theory of Indian jurisdiction that the public explanation never bothers to build. The published reason is travel inconvenience. That is not a legal theory. That is a calendar excuse.

If the alleged March 2021 demand occurred in Singapore, or by Singapore-based colleagues against a Singapore-resident CEO of a Singapore company, then Mumbai is not the natural first court. It is the court she chose after the company had already fired her, after the forensic cloud had already settled over her tenure, and after Zilingo itself was dead.

Delayed reporting of sexual violence is a documented reality. Fear, shame, career calculation, and trauma all exist. None of that erases the specific oddity here: the same woman who in 2022 could instruct lawyers to send a board notice describing rape-video threats was, on the 2024 story, too busy in Singapore to use Singapore.

The financial wreck she wants treated as a subplot

The harassment narrative did not arrive in a clean room. It arrived after a board had already decided the books could not be trusted.

People familiar with the Kroll work told Indian Express and others that the probe looked at accounting practices and payments of more than US$7 million to a cluster of technology and consulting vendors, signed in circumstances senior executives said they did not fully know. Bose’s answer was that every payment had documents and that finance, tech or operations knew. Mint separately reported that Kroll’s brief did not include tracing those payments into personal bank accounts. No public Indian court has convicted her of criminal fraud over those vendor flows. That matters. It also matters that the board, after an independent forensic process, still fired its CEO with cause, that lenders accelerated debt, that audits for FY2020 and FY2021 were a running problem, and that a near-unicorn went to liquidation.

In November 2025, reporting on a Directorate General of GST Intelligence complaint (SS Case No. 155/2025) added another formal layer against Bose, Zilingo Global Pvt. Ltd. and others in Mumbai over alleged GST/invoice issues. That case is a government complaint, not a blog. It is also not a substitute for a finding on the sexual-harassment FIR. It is context for why “I was only a victim” is a branding exercise, not a closed audit.

The sequence the accused men keep pointing at is the sequence the public can actually see: investigation and suspension first; formal harassment escalation in the company’s telling after that; criminal sex-offence FIR almost two years after the firing. Bose’s side says the harassment was older and suppressed. The company’s side says it was later and tactical. A newspaper cannot pretend that chronological fight is a footnote.

The question, put without perfume

If Ankiti Bose was, in March 2021, being told that her CEO job depended on sexual access to her colleagues, why did the CEO of a Singapore company not use the Singapore Police, TAFEP, or the Protection from Harassment Court?

If, by August 2020, she was receiving rape-video threats that left her “scared to leave Singapore,” why did that fear produce a 2022 lawyer’s letter to a board and a 2024 FIR in Mumbai, but no public Singapore criminal file?

If the conduct continued to October 2023, as the FIR period is reported, why did a woman living in Singapore through those months still need “leave” to complain in Borivali?

If the new Singapore job was the obstacle, what kind of job prevents a police report in the city where the job is, but permits a six-to-eight-page criminal complaint the moment she elects to fly?

Those are not traps set by misogyny. They are the questions any competent criminal investigator in either country would ask. They are the questions her public explanation does not answer. They are the questions that remain open because the FIR, as of the last detailed national reporting through mid-2026, had not been tested in a trial.

Sexual harassment allegations deserve to be investigated, not sneered off the page. They also deserve to be filed where the alleged acts, the alleged actors, the employer, and the complainant actually were. Bose chose the police station that was a plane ride away, after the company that employed her had already collapsed, and offered as justification the job that sat in the very city whose courts she never publicly used.

That is not a mystery of trauma. That is a choice of forum. Until she puts a Singapore filing on the table — or explains, with documents, why the jurisdiction that housed the alleged crime was left untouched — the loudest part of this story is the silence she maintained on Orchard Road, and the noise she later made in Borivali.