There is one question in the Ankiti Bose–Zilingo saga that is uncomfortable precisely because it is so simple:

If the serious sexual-harassment and intimidation incidents now described by Ankiti Bose occurred during the period in which she was running a Singapore-headquartered company, and if she was herself living and working in Singapore, why is the publicly documented criminal complaint not a Singapore complaint, but a Mumbai FIR filed almost two years after she left Zilingo?

That question does not establish that Bose’s allegations are false.

It does not establish that the two men she accused committed no wrongdoing.

It does not mean a delayed complaint is inherently unbelievable.

But it is a legitimate investigative question because the chronology is unusually stark, the alleged conduct is serious, Singapore had established police and workplace-harassment channels, and Bose’s own contemporaneous account shows that she did take at least some steps concerning harassment before the eventual Indian FIR.

The uncomfortable truth is that the public record does not currently provide a complete answer.

And that absence of an answer matters.

Start with the allegation itself

On 23 April 2024, Ankiti Bose filed a criminal complaint at Kasturba Marg Police Station in Borivali East, Mumbai, after which Mumbai Police registered an FIR against her former Zilingo co-founder Dhruv Kapoor and former COO Aadi Vaidya.

Reports based on the FIR said Bose alleged that in March 2021 the two men threatened her and demanded sexual favours, including allegedly telling her that she could be removed as CEO if she did not comply and asking her to meet in a hotel room. The FIR also contained allegations concerning intimidation, stalking, online abuse, corporate deception and pressure connected to her shares and position in Zilingo.

Kapoor publicly rejected the allegations as baseless, untrue and malicious and characterised the complaint as retaliatory. Vaidya likewise denied the allegations and called the action an afterthought intended to damage his reputation. Those are their stated positions, not judicial findings.

That distinction is essential.

As of the public reporting reviewed for this article, the allegations in the Mumbai FIR have not been adjudicated by a criminal court on their merits. No conviction has established them as facts.

But the reverse is equally important: a registered FIR is not a judgment that the allegations are false either.

So this investigation is about the chronology, forum and documentary trail, not about declaring either side guilty.

The chronology is where the story becomes difficult

The dates deserve to be placed next to one another.

28 August 2020: Bose’s legal notice to the Zilingo board, as reported by Business Today in April 2022, referred to threatening messages allegedly coming from fake accounts created through disappearing email accounts and containing sexually explicit and violent material. The notice said Bose became extremely distressed and was “scared to leave Singapore.” It also alleged that Kapoor and Vaidya were aware of the situation but did not assist her, and that she consequently resorted to lawyers.

March 2021: The later Mumbai FIR alleged a demand for sexual favours, threats to remove her from the CEO position and late-night communications involving requests to meet in a hotel room.

31 March 2022: Zilingo suspended Bose following complaints concerning alleged financial irregularities. The company said the complaints were serious and required an investigation.

11 April 2022: Zilingo said Bose brought “certain harassment-related issues pertaining to past time periods” to the board’s attention after her suspension. The company specifically said these were raised after 31 March.

May 2022: Zilingo appointed Deloitte to investigate the harassment allegations Bose had raised.

20 May 2022: Zilingo terminated Bose’s employment, saying it had acted “with cause” following an investigation into alleged financial irregularities. Bose disputed the company’s conclusions and the process.

June 2022: Bose resigned from the directorships of Zilingo’s holding company and subsidiaries.

23 April 2024: Nearly 23 months after her termination, Bose filed the Mumbai criminal complaint that resulted in the FIR under Sections 354A and 354D of the IPC, according to contemporary reporting.

That timeline is not a minor footnote.

It is the central investigative fact.

But did Bose actually remain silent in Singapore?

No — and this is where simplistic attacks on her account fall apart.

The available record shows that she did raise harassment-related issues before the Zilingo board in 2022, and her legal notice referred to earlier threatening communications and confidential legal action. Business Today reported that the notice claimed she had been so frightened that she was afraid to leave Singapore and had gone to lawyers.

The company itself confirmed that harassment-related matters had been raised with the board after her suspension.

Deloitte was then brought in to examine the allegations. Economic Times reported that Deloitte contacted Bose and sought a meeting and supporting documents from her.

So the proposition “she said nothing about harassment until 2024” is demonstrably too crude.

The real question is narrower and far more serious:

Why was there apparently no Singapore police complaint or other publicly identifiable Singapore criminal proceeding concerning the alleged conduct before the Mumbai FIR of April 2024?

That is the question the public record still does not satisfactorily answer.

Singapore was not a legal vacuum

This is perhaps the most important part of the investigation.

Singapore had legal and institutional avenues through which harassment could be reported.

The Singapore Police Force’s current official guidance says victims of sexual crime can report to police regardless of when the incident occurred, either through an online report or at a police station. It explicitly says early reporting can help preserve evidence. It also identifies the National Anti-Violence and Sexual Harassment Helpline as an avenue for reporting sexual harassment.

Singapore’s Protection from Harassment Act also provides statutory protection against harassment, including threatening, abusive, insulting, sexual or indecent communications, and unlawful stalking. The legislation has existed since 2014 and its 2020 Revised Edition incorporated amendments through 1 December 2021.

And the Tripartite Alliance for Fair & Progressive Employment Practices — TAFEP — specifically recognises sexual harassment and stalking as forms of workplace harassment. Its guidance says workplace harassment can occur not only in an office but also during work-related events and through email, text messaging and social media.

TAFEP also identifies multiple possible routes, including internal grievance procedures, police reports, protection orders and civil action.

This matters because it destroys one easy excuse:

Singapore did have mechanisms through which such allegations could have been documented.

The law was there.

The police route was there.

The workplace route was there.

A harassment-reporting ecosystem was there.

Yet no publicly identified Singapore criminal complaint concerning the alleged March 2021 demand has emerged from the record reviewed for this article.

That does not prove none existed.

It does mean the paper trail is conspicuously thin.

The most revealing sentence may have come from Bose’s own explanation for the delay

When the Mumbai FIR was filed in 2024, the question of delay was put directly to the complainant.

Economic Times reported that her explanation was that, after leaving Zilingo, she took a new job, remained busy and did not get leave from work to file the complaint.

The Free Press Journal reported a similar explanation from a senior police official: Bose had joined a company in Singapore and filed the complaint when she came to Mumbai on leave.

That explanation is interesting for one very obvious reason.

It explains, at least according to the reporting, why the complaint was filed in Mumbai when she finally came to India.

It does not really explain:

Why she did not file a complaint in Singapore while she was living and working there.

That is a different question.

And it remains unanswered in the publicly available record.

The “I was in Singapore and busy” explanation therefore creates a second question

Suppose Bose’s explanation is taken at face value.

She says she had a new job.

She says she was busy.

She says she could not take leave to travel to India to make the complaint.

Fine.

But a police report in Singapore would not necessarily have required a trip to Mumbai.

The Singapore Police Force provides an online police-report mechanism for non-emergency crimes, while its sexual-crime guidance says a victim can report online or attend a police station.

That creates a very specific factual question:

Was the delay caused by an inability to access the Indian forum, or was there a deliberate decision to wait for an Indian forum?

The evidence available publicly does not answer that.

And there is a difference between those two explanations.

One concerns logistics.

The other concerns forum selection.

A serious investigation cannot simply blur them together.

There is another complication: Bose says she was afraid

This is the strongest counterpoint to those questioning the delay.

Her 2022 legal notice, according to Business Today, said she was “extremely distraught” and afraid to leave Singapore because of the threats she allegedly received. The notice said she had taken a legal and confidential route because people alleged to be controlling the internal organisation made it difficult for her to act openly.

That matters.

A frightened person may not behave according to the neat chronology later constructed by lawyers, journalists or investigators.

Fear, professional dependence, internal power structures and reputational concerns can all affect reporting decisions.

Therefore, delay alone cannot logically establish fabrication.

But journalism must also ask the next question:

If fear was the explanation, where is the contemporaneous documentation?

Where are the Singapore police reports?

Where are the lawyer’s letters?

Where are dated complaints?

Where are the emails?

Where are the board minutes?

Where are the internal grievance records?

Where are the contemporaneous messages?

Where are the witnesses?

Where is the evidence showing what happened in March 2021 and what action was taken immediately afterward?

These are evidentiary questions, not allegations of guilt.

The strangest aspect of the dispute: the harassment investigation came after the financial investigation began

This is where the Zilingo chronology becomes extraordinarily consequential.

Zilingo says the sequence began with complaints about financial irregularities.

Bose was suspended on 31 March 2022.

The company says the harassment issues were raised on 11 April 2022, after the suspension.

The board then appointed Deloitte to investigate those allegations.

Bose’s side disputed that version.

According to reporting based on sources close to her, she had raised concerns about leadership and workplace problems before the suspension, including in August 2021. The Indian Express reported competing accounts: Bose’s side said she had complained earlier, while Zilingo maintained that harassment-related allegations were first brought to the board after the March 31 suspension.

That disagreement could theoretically be settled.

Not by Twitter.

Not by press releases.

Not by television debates.

Not by hostile headlines.

It could be settled by timestamps.

Emails.

Board minutes.

Lawyers’ correspondence.

Complaint logs.

Calendar records.

Phone records.

Archived messages.

And the original Deloitte documentation.

Yet the full Deloitte report has not become part of the public evidentiary record examined here.

That is a major hole in the story.

And then there is the 23-month gap

The most uncomfortable number in this entire episode is not a valuation.

It is 23 months.

From Zilingo’s termination of Bose in May 2022 to the Mumbai FIR in April 2024.

That does not automatically invalidate the complaint.

But it changes how the complaint should be investigated.

The longer the interval between an alleged event and formal criminal reporting, the more important contemporaneous evidence becomes.

That is not an attack on Bose.

It is investigative common sense.

And Singapore’s own police guidance says early reporting can help preserve evidence, while also explicitly making clear that victims may report irrespective of when the incident happened.

So the correct journalistic conclusion is not:

“She waited, therefore she lied.”

That would be intellectually lazy.

The correct conclusion is:

“She waited; therefore the missing contemporaneous record becomes an important evidentiary question.”

There is a vast difference.

Why Mumbai?

Another question deserves equal prominence.

Why did the criminal complaint end up at a police station in Mumbai?

The public reporting establishes that Mumbai Police registered the FIR.

But the publicly available material does not clearly map every alleged act onto a territorial basis for Mumbai.

Where was the alleged March 2021 demand actually made?

Where were Bose and the accused physically located?

Where were the calls made from?

Where were they received?

Where were the messages generated?

Where did the alleged stalking occur?

Which events happened in Singapore?

Which, if any, occurred in India?

Which alleged conduct occurred online?

Which acts allegedly produced consequences in Mumbai?

These are not pedantic questions.

They go directly to the forensic reconstruction of the case.

Cross-border harassment can produce acts and consequences in more than one jurisdiction, so the existence of a Singapore nexus does not itself invalidate the Mumbai FIR.

But it makes the jurisdictional chronology worth explaining.

The public record reviewed for this article does not provide that full explanation.

What we know about Singapore is unusually clear

Zilingo was a Singapore-headquartered company. Contemporary reporting consistently described it as a Singapore-based startup.

The company’s corporate life, boardroom disputes, fundraising, investigations and leadership crisis were heavily centred on Singapore.

Bose herself was publicly described as the leader of the Singapore startup.

And in April 2022, her legal notice reportedly said she was frightened to leave Singapore.

So this is not a situation in which Singapore is a remote jurisdiction having only a superficial connection to the dispute.

Singapore was at the centre of the Zilingo story.

That is precisely why the absence of a publicly documented Singapore police proceeding becomes such a persistent question.

A complaint to the board is not the same as a criminal complaint

This distinction must not be lost.

Bose appears, from the public record, to have pursued at least some internal and legal channels.

But a complaint to a company’s board and a criminal complaint to police are not interchangeable.

A board investigates employment and governance issues.

Police investigate suspected crimes.

A company-appointed professional-services investigation is not the same thing as a prosecution.

And a later Indian FIR is not evidence that an earlier Singapore investigation existed.

That is why the public needs to know, in documentary terms:

Was any complaint ever made to the Singapore Police Force?

Was any complaint made to TAFEP?

Was any application made under the Protection from Harassment Act?

Was any complaint lodged through a Zilingo internal grievance channel?

Did Bose’s lawyers send a formal Singapore legal notice concerning the alleged 2020 or 2021 incidents?

Did any witness make a contemporaneous statement?

Was any evidence supplied to Singapore authorities?

These questions are much more useful than simply calling one side a liar and the other side a victim.

The Deloitte episode makes those questions even more important

The board’s decision to appoint Deloitte is independently reported.

Economic Times reported that Deloitte contacted Bose and asked her to attend a meeting and provide relevant documents.

Zilingo subsequently said it had followed due process in examining her harassment claims. Bose disputed the broader fairness of the investigations and said she had not been given access to the Kroll and Deloitte reports.

That leaves another remarkable documentary gap.

If Deloitte investigated the harassment allegations, what did Deloitte conclude?

The answer is not fully available to the public.

Without the underlying report, journalists are left relying on competing descriptions of what happened.

That is precisely how a corporate dispute becomes a permanent media war.

One side says:

“I was harassed.”

The other side says:

“The allegation is retaliatory.”

The company says:

“We investigated and followed due process.”

And the public gets neither the original evidence nor the complete independent report.

That is not a satisfactory model for resolving a dispute of this seriousness.

What the record does — and does not — establish

The public record establishes that:

Bose was a co-founder and CEO of Zilingo, a Singapore-based startup.

Zilingo suspended her on 31 March 2022 following complaints concerning alleged financial irregularities.

Bose subsequently raised harassment-related allegations concerning earlier periods.

The company appointed Deloitte to investigate those allegations.

Bose was terminated in May 2022 and resigned from Zilingo’s boards in June.

In April 2024, Mumbai Police registered an FIR arising from Bose’s complaint against Kapoor and Vaidya, involving allegations including sexual harassment and stalking.

The accused denied the allegations.

The public reporting reviewed here does not establish that a Singapore police complaint was filed concerning the alleged March 2021 sexual-favour demand.

The public record also does not establish that no such confidential or private complaint ever existed.

Those two statements can both be true.

The question that should now be put directly to Ankiti Bose

This investigation should therefore not end with insinuation.

It should end with questions.

Ms Bose, was a police complaint ever filed in Singapore concerning the alleged sexual-harassment incidents?

If yes:

When?

With which police station or authority?

What was the report number?

Was any investigation initiated?

What was the outcome?

If no:

Why not?

Was the reason fear?

Was it employment dependence?

Was it concern about corporate retaliation?

Was it advice from counsel?

Was it a decision to handle the issue internally?

Was it because the alleged conduct was primarily online?

Was it because she did not regard the conduct as suitable for criminal reporting at that time?

Or was the decision simply not to pursue Singapore criminal proceedings?

And regarding the 2024 FIR:

Why Mumbai rather than Singapore?

The explanation that she was busy and lacked leave to travel to India explains the timing of the Indian complaint only partially. It does not explain the absence of a Singapore complaint while she was physically present there.

That is the precise gap that remains.

A final word on fairness

There is a temptation in cases like this to turn chronology into conviction.

That would be a mistake.

A delayed sexual-harassment complaint can be genuine.

A delayed complaint can also require particularly careful evidentiary examination.

A complainant can have legitimate reasons for not approaching police immediately.

An accused can legitimately deny an accusation.

A company can conduct an investigation.

A complainant can challenge that investigation.

A police officer can register an FIR.

And none of those events, standing alone, is a final determination of truth.

The real scandal of the Zilingo saga may therefore be less dramatic — and more revealing — than the competing narratives suggest.

It is a story in which serious allegations were made, serious corporate allegations were made in the opposite direction, two major investigations took place, an extraordinarily valuable startup collapsed, the relevant forensic reports remained largely outside public scrutiny, and the criminal allegations subsequently landed in an Indian police station nearly two years later.

The public is entitled to ask why.

And in the Singapore question, the strongest defensible conclusion is also the simplest:

There is a documented Singapore connection, documented harassment allegations, documented internal legal action, documented later Deloitte involvement, and a documented Mumbai FIR — but the public record reviewed does not disclose a Singapore police complaint concerning the alleged March 2021 incident. Bose has offered an explanation for why the Indian complaint was delayed, but that explanation does not fully answer why Singapore was apparently not used as the principal criminal forum while she was there.

That is not a verdict against Ankiti Bose.

It is a demand for the missing documentation.

And in an investigative story, the missing document can sometimes be more important than the loudest allegation.

Sources

Singapore Police Force guidance on reporting sexual crimes and police reports:

Singapore Protection from Harassment Act and statutory framework:

TAFEP guidance on workplace harassment and reporting options:

Business Today reporting on Bose’s 2022 legal notice and harassment allegations:

Economic Times reporting on the April 2024 FIR and Bose’s stated explanation for the delay:

Contemporary reporting on the Deloitte harassment investigation:

Contemporary Singapore reporting on the Zilingo suspension and termination chronology: