Zilingo’s Missing Verdict: US$308 Million Raised, Two Unpublished Reports, One Stalled FIR, and No One Held to Account

The record, and where it stops

The established facts fit in one table. Everything that would explain them is missing.

A company once described as having about 600 employees in eight countries ended with fewer than 100, according to The Online Citizen, citing Bloomberg. Its debt facility stood at a reported US$40 million, per Inc42.

Two reports nobody outside the boardroom has read

Two professional investigations sit at the centre of this story, and neither has ever been published. Kroll examined the financial complaints. Deloitte examined the harassment complaints. A chief executive lost her job on the strength of the first. Two men were publicly cleared, by a company statement, on the strength of the second.

Bose has said repeatedly that she never saw either document. “I have neither seen the Kroll nor Deloitte reports,” she said on the day she was fired, according to Outlook Business. She repeated it when she left the board, as Entrackr reported. Zilingo called her claims of concealment “inaccurate”.

The secrecy cuts against every party. Kapoor said in 2024 that “a thorough investigation has already proven her wrongdoing”. The investigation he relies on has never been shown to the public or, on her account, to the person it condemned. Zilingo said the harassment review concluded that the company “took appropriate action”. Nobody outside can check what Deloitte was asked, whom it interviewed or what it found. As late as January 2023, Inc42 reported “no updates on the matter”.

Even the question of who commissioned Kroll is disputed. Burda says the firm was “jointly hired by the main investors”. Bose’s side told Inc42 it was commissioned by “one single investor”. A one-page engagement letter would settle that. It has not been produced.

Press accounts built on unnamed sources have described what the Kroll findings supposedly contain. Inc42, which published the most detailed of them, stated that it was not shown either report. Sources told the same outlet the reports were being withheld deliberately, to be used in future legal discovery. Three and a half years later, there is no public litigation in which to discover them.

A liquidation without a public account

Zilingo has been in liquidation since early 2023, and the process has produced no public explanation of where the money went. A liquidator has the standing to examine a failed company’s affairs and to pursue claims against anyone who wronged it. If the liquidators of Zilingo have reached conclusions about the conduct of any director, officer or investor nominee, those conclusions have not surfaced in any reporting reviewed for this article.

The opacity predates the collapse. When the company entered liquidation, its ACRA record showed it had not filed a financial report since March 2019, according to The Online Citizen. That gap covers the entire period in dispute. It also covers the period in which a board carrying nominees of some of Asia’s most sophisticated investors was responsible for oversight.

That board has escaped scrutiny almost entirely. Investor representatives from Sequoia, Temasek and Burda vacated their seats in the weeks after the suspension, Inc42 reported. Whatever went wrong at Zilingo went wrong on their watch. No public document asks how a company could go years without filed accounts while directors appointed by a sovereign fund and a global venture firm sat at the table.

The sale of the technology assets to Buyogo was completed at an undisclosed price. Employees, small creditors and minority shareholders have been told nothing about what was recovered.

Investors who reserved the right to sue, and filed nothing public

The people who lost the most money have done the least to establish the truth. On 20 May 2022, Zilingo announced that it “reserves the right to pursue appropriate legal action”. In April 2023, Burda said investors were “still considering options for legal action” and declined to share anything from the Kroll report.

It is now October 2026. No civil claim, criminal complaint or regulatory referral by Zilingo, its liquidators or its investors against any former executive has been publicly reported.

That silence admits only two readings, and both are damning. If the Kroll findings are as serious as the company’s “with cause” language implied, then funds managing public and institutional money have declined to recover it or to test the evidence in court. If the findings are weaker than implied, then a chief executive was dismissed and publicly branded on a basis her accusers have chosen never to defend under oath.

Either way, the investors have enjoyed the benefit of the accusation without bearing the burden of proving it. Bose told Inc42 in 2023 that she had not ruled out legal recourse of her own over her dismissal. No such suit against the board or shareholders has been publicly reported either. The central employment dispute of the saga has never been put before a judge by anyone.

A serious FIR, and no reported outcome

A criminal complaint alleging sexual harassment has sat with Mumbai Police for about 29 months without a publicly reported charge sheet or closure report. Bose’s complaint, described by Business Today as six pages long, accuses Kapoor and Vaidya of cheating, fraud, criminal intimidation and sexual and mental harassment. Other reports say the FIR invokes the Indian Penal Code provisions on sexual harassment and stalking.

Both men reject it completely. Kapoor called the allegations “completely baseless, untrue, and malicious” and “retaliatory”. Vaidya called them “a clear afterthought done with a malicious intention to harm my reputation and harass me”.

The complaint was filed roughly 23 months after Bose’s dismissal, and in Mumbai, although Zilingo was headquartered in Singapore. Those facts have been used to attack her account. They prove nothing by themselves. Delayed reporting of sexual harassment is common, and conduct that crosses borders can fall within more than one jurisdiction. Timing and forum are questions for an investigating officer and a court to weigh against evidence. They are not a verdict, and commentary is no substitute for one.

The real scandal is the stall. The Code of Criminal Procedure, under which this FIR was registered, requires every investigation to be completed “without unnecessary delay”. If the evidence supports the complaint, a complainant has waited two and a half years for a charge sheet. If it does not, two men have lived for two and a half years under an accusation of sexual misconduct that the police could have closed. Mumbai Police have not publicly said which it is, or why neither has happened.

The only court orders so far concern reputation, not the facts

The courts that have ruled in this saga have ruled on what may be said about it, because nobody has asked a court to decide what happened. In 2023 the Bombay High Court granted Bose an injunction in her defamation suit over an Outlook Business column by investor Mahesh Murthy, as LiveLaw reported. The same court later declined to entertain a separate suit against NDTV and an Inc42 journalist, according to Bar and Bench.

In 2026 a Dwarka court in Delhi granted Bose an ex parte interim injunction against an online article. As India.com reported, the court noted that she is the complainant in the Mumbai FIR and not an accused. It restrained the defendants from imputing criminal conduct, fraud or misappropriation to her without a judicial finding. On 24 August 2026 the Delhi High Court issued a further interim restraint concerning articles on the website Inventiva, The Statesman reported. These are interim orders in pending civil suits.

The orders state the obvious point that the rest of the system has ignored. There is no judicial finding against Bose. There is equally no judicial finding against Kapoor or Vaidya. Where findings are absent, speculation fills the space, and people’s names are damaged by it. Every month the primary evidence stays locked away, that damage compounds for all three.

What must happen now

Four institutions hold the evidence, and each has a specific job it has not visibly done.

1. Mumbai Police should conclude the investigation into the April 2024 FIR and file either a charge sheet or a closure report before a magistrate. Twenty-nine months is long enough. The supervising officers should set and publish a deadline.
2. The trial court, if a charge sheet is filed, should hear the case on a fast, fixed schedule. A sexual harassment allegation should not take a decade to resolve, for the complainant’s sake and for the accused’s.
3. Zilingo’s liquidators should give creditors and shareholders a clear account of what was examined, what was recovered and whether any claim against any former director, officer or nominee is being pursued or has been ruled out.
4. The investors who commissioned Kroll should either bring the legal action they have talked about since 2022 or state publicly that they will not. They should also release the Kroll and Deloitte findings to the people named in them, starting with Bose, Kapoor and Vaidya.

Singapore’s corporate regulator has its own question to answer: how a company backed by state-linked funds went from March 2019 to its liquidation without filed financial statements, and what was done about it.

A company that raised US$308 million disappeared. A woman says she was sexually harassed. Two men say they were falsely accused. A chief executive says she was removed on evidence she was never shown. Every one of those claims can be tested, and after four years none has been. That is the failure, and it has institutional authors.

Disclaimer

Allegations remain allegations. As of 9 October 2026, no court of law in India, Singapore or anywhere else has, to this publication’s knowledge, convicted Ankiti Bose, Dhruv Kapoor or Aadi Vaidya of any offence connected with Zilingo, or made any judicial finding of wrongdoing against any of them. Ms Bose is the complainant in the Mumbai FIR and is not an accused in it. Mr Kapoor and Mr Vaidya deny the allegations in that FIR, and an FIR is the start of an investigation, not proof of guilt. Ms Bose denies the financial allegations made by Zilingo and disputes the basis of her termination.

The Kroll and Deloitte reports have not been published and were not available for this article. Nothing here should be read as endorsing either side’s account. This article is based on published reporting, court reporting and company statements, linked below. Statements that something has “not been publicly reported” reflect a review of open sources and do not rule out confidential or unreported proceedings. Every person named is presumed innocent, and each is invited to respond; any response will be published.