Chennai: Former Karnataka chief minister S M Krishna’s son-in-law and owner of Cafe Coffee Day, V G Siddhartha, has gone missing in Mangaluru since last night.
According to his driver, he was asked to drive towards the Nethravathi bridge and told to stop there. Siddhartha then reportedly told him that he was going to take a walk. But, the driver said, he jumped off the bridge into the Nethravathi river.
The Bengaluru police corroborated this by stating that he went missing from the Netravathi bridge Monday night and has since been untraceable. The dog squad stopped in the middle of the bridge so they are using fishermen and boats to try and trace him in the river, the police said.
In his last letter to the board of directors and shareholders of Cafe Coffee Day, Siddhartha talks about his financial problems and says that he has failed as a businessman.
“My intention was never to cheat or mislead anybody. I have failed as an entrepreneur. This is my sincere submission. I hope someday you will understand, forgive and pardon me,” he says in the letter published by Economic Times website.
A first generation entrepreneur, Siddhartha (58), came from a coffee-growing family in Chikmagalur, in Karnataka. A postgraduate in Economics, he opened the first Cafe Coffee Day outlet in 1996 in Bengaluru at the most popular Brigade Road.
Now he lords over 1,750 outlets across India and has a presence in Nepal, Egypt, Malaysia, Czech Republic and Venice.
Married to S M Krishna’s daughter, he has two children.