Death of a Coffee King
FROM THE EDITORG. Siddhartha’s apparent suicide and the purported suicide note sent
shock waves through India’s business circles, especially in Bengaluru
from where he operated. It also left a surfeit of unanswered questions- about the exact amount of debt he was reeling under, the value
of his assets, the pressures from the private equity partner and his
relationship with politicians. For a man who was excessively reserved
and took great efforts to shun media publicity, his death has created exactly
the kind of media spectacle he tried his best to avoid while he lived.
Some of the answers will eventually come out – like the amount of money
he had borrowed from various sources, which is currently difficult to fully
collate because of the maze of private and public companies through which
they were taken. Others may never be fully answered – including the role of
Karnataka politics in the factors that triggered his extreme step.
But his rise and fall provide glimpses of what it takes to succeed and also
the factors that can undo decades of hard work.
Siddhartha was not a rags to riches story. He belonged to a wealthy,
coffee estate-owning family. His ambition was to build a coffee empire that
would rival those around the world and a brand name that could be spotted
in the developed world’s best locations. He was hard-working and initially
borrowed money from his father to set up a stockbroking company. He was
a lucky participant in Bengaluru’s and India’s software services boom. As
a stockbroker, he was asked by the legendary Nimesh Kampani to pick up
unsubscribed shares in Infosys’s initial public offering. When the company
listed and the shares went through the roof, Siddhartha made a huge profit.
He subsequently invested in other tech shares of Bengaluru companies,
including Mindtree. But his first love was always coffee. Any spare cash he had
was ploughed back to increase his coffee plantations. Where his family had a
few hundred acres, Siddhartha accumulated over 12,000 acres. He married
a politician’s daughter and had many political friends, but never showed the
slightest inkling of building a political career. He was an early beneficiary of
India’s economic liberalisation, and set up Café Coffee Day, which is currently
the dominant coffee chain in the country and holds its own in the market,
despite competition from global players such as Costa Coffee and Starbucks.
He painstakingly built up his business – but finally what undid him was,
among other things, the debt problems and overexpansion that has been the
bane of many Indian businessmen. Siddhartha had tried to reduce his debt by
raising equity – through his own IPO and later by selling his Mindtree shares.
That did not prove to be enough.
The full story behind his income-tax problems will probably never be
known except to a handful of people very close to him. The IT department says
that it conducted raids and found evidence of unaccounted cash and a possible
evidence of it being political money from his premises. The Congress claims that
Siddhartha was pressured by tax authorities because of his political leanings
despite the fact that his father-in-law had joined the BJP some time back.
Siddhartha is an extreme example of how using debt to fund expansions
can undo you.
V
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