Ecommerce company Snapdeal’s parent Jasper Infotech has registered an FIR against former senior executives of Quickdel Logistics, the parent company of e-commerce logistics entity GoJavas with the Economic Offences Wing of Delhi Police., according to an Economic Times report.
Snapdeal has registered a criminal complaint against GoJavas for cheating, forgery, conspiracy, criminal breach of trust and criminal misappropriation of funds.
The FIR, which is dated June 23 names former executive director of Quickdel Logistics Abhijeet Singh, along with promoters Praveen Sinha, Randhir Singh and Ashish Chaudhary as the main accused.
Snapdeal told ET that the company does not hold any shares in GoJavas and had filed a complaint in 2016 with the Delhi Police, which was duly investigated and the FIR registered on Friday.
Snapdeal held 49.99% shares in GoJavas till the latter got acquired by Pigeon Express in March 2016, following which Snapdeal sold it shared to Pigeon Express.
“The deal is a fire-sale and the company wanted the bad investments off the books,” a person who was part of the structured deal told ET.
Snapdeal registered the complaint with Delhi Police based on the findings of an inspection of accounts of Quickdel from January 2015 to March 2015. The investigations indicated illegal, inflated and excess payments to non-existent persons.
“The complainant was induced into buying shares of Quickdel from Quickdel and Randhir Singh and Praveen Sinha. The complainant acquired 49.99% shareholding in Quickdel by paying an amount of Rs 119.99 crore to Randhir Singh and Praveen Sinha and Rs 237.27 crore to Quickdel,” states the FIR.
When contacted by ET, Sinha said that he was “unaware of the existence of the FIR.” Sinha originally owned a significant minority share in the company along with co-promoters at a little less than 20% which was sold over a period of time to Jasper Infotech.
All in all, Snapdeal invested Rs 357.26 crore in the Quickdel between 2015.
The formation of GoJavas was one of the flags raised by a forensic audit conducted by Pricewaterhouse-Coopers in Sweden in January 2016. The audit was commissioned by Rocket Internet, which owned fashion portal Jabong.
The audit alleged that the investors were unaware of the carving out of the logistics unit GoJavas into a separate entity and private equity capital raised by the company from Snapdeal, as reported by ET in July 2016. Rocket Internet did not press any charges following the audit.