CCD Owner VG Siddhartha Found Dead, Body Recovered On Banks Of Netravati River In Karnataka

On Tuesday, Siddhartha had left from Bengaluru to Sakleshpur in Hassan district on Monday afternoon, but he asked his driver to turn towards Mangaluru on the way.

AFP IMAGE

Mangaluru: A day after Cafe Coffee Day founder V G Siddhartha went missing on his way to this coastal city in Karnataka from Bengaluru, his decomposed body was found on the banks of Netravati River near Hoige Bazaar in Mangaluru on Wednesday. The body will now be sent for postmortem and will then be handed over to the family.

#BREAKING | A body has been found which appears to be of #CCD owner V G #Siddhartha: Sasikanth Senthil, Deputy Commissioner of Dakshina Kannada

— ABP News (@ABPNews) July 31, 2019

The body had washed ashore near Ullal and was fished out by local fishermen, following which police reached the spot. Mangalore CoP Sandeep Patil said "we have found a body near Mangalore's Hoige Bazaar. We are confirming if the body is Mr Siddharth's. We have conveyed the matter to his family. The body has been sent to Wenlock Hospital for post mortem. We will intensify the investigation." Earlier on Tuesday, the 58-year-old Siddhartha had left from Bengaluru to Sakleshpur in Hassan district on Monday afternoon, but he asked his driver to turn towards Mangaluru on the way, according to police. He was last seen near a bridge on Netravati river in Dakshina Kannada district on Monday night. He had told his driver he was going for a walk near the bridge. Soon teams of National Disaster Response Force, Coast Guard, Home Guard, fire services and coastal police were seen scouring the waters under a bridge across the swollen Nethravathi, where Siddhartha was last seen. In the letter, widely circulated in the social media, Siddhartha alleged there was a lot of harassment from the previous DG of the Income Tax Department in the form of attaching "our shares on two separate occasions to block our Mindtree deal and then taking position of our Coffee Day shares, although revised returns have been filed by us (sic)". "This was very unfair and has led to a serious liquidity crunch," the letter, bearing a purported signature of Siddhartha, said. The department has refuted the charges. "I have failed as an entrepreneur." "...I have failed to create the right profitable business model despite my best efforts," Siddhartha, who built the coffee empire over the last 37 years, said in the letter.

Who Was Cafe Coffee Day (CCD) Founder V G Siddhartha ?

• V G Siddarth was from Chikkamagaluru and was married to the daughter of former chief minister of Karnataka, SM Krishna.
• The businessman who went missing was married to Krishna's first daughter Malavika and the couple has two sons.
• After completing his post-graduation, Siddarth had started working at JM Financial Limited in Mumbai.
• Later, he shifted to Bengaluru and started a company in the name of Sivan Securities. The company was renamed Global Technology Ventures in the year 2000.
• Along with that he also started the Cafe Coffee Day chain. He was credited with making the Chikkamagaluru coffee popular worldwide.
• Cafe Coffee Day is owned by Coffee Day Global, a subsidiary of Coffee Day Enterprises and is India’s market leader in the organised café space with around 1,750 cafes across the country.