20 mei 2022
09:59
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Singaporean online fashion retailer Zilingo has fired its discredited co-founder Ankiti Bose. More bad news for Sofina, which has seen its share price melt this week after noted short Fraser Perring’s attack on his valuation model.
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Bose is suspected of accounting irregularities. She became mid April deactivated by the company. The irregularities are said to have been discovered during the preparation of a new capital round.
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Bose formally denies the allegations against her and speaks of a ‘witch hunt’, which was allegedly started in response to complaints she allegedly made about a shareholder of the company.
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It’s not the only setback for Zilingo. Earlier this week Concerned creditors of the online fashion retailer immediately and in full reclaimed their loans to the company.
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Since the outbreak of the scandal, several executives have resigned from Zilingo. After the representatives of the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek and the German fund Burda, the representative of the American investment fund Sequoia, a long-standing ally of Sofina, also resigned recently.
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Sofina
stepped in 2018 in Zilingo and was the leading investor in a $54 million capital round. Begin 2019 Sofina put money on the table for a second time. In the middle of last year, the Boël family owned almost 7 percent of the shares.
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Zilingo is an Asian variant of the online fashion store Zalando and focuses on the Southeast Asian market. It started as an online store but grew into an all-in-one platform (purchasing, production, stocks, marketing) for international brands.
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THG sends bidders walking
The e-commerce company THG (ex-The Hut Group), 8.3 percent owned by Sofina, turned down an offer of 2.1 billion pounds (2.5 billion euros) from investors Belerion and King Street Capital on Thursday evening. According to THG
their takeover proposal is much too low. British entrepreneur-investor Nick Candy has also had his eye on the company.
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THG’s share price climbed by a quarter on Friday morning in response to that news, trading at around 146 pence. A boost for shareholders. The stock lost this year already three quarters of its value, including after questionable financial transactions between THG and its CEO Matt Molding. The company traded at 500 pence per share in 2020 to the stock exchange.
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