Rahul Bhatia takes IndiGo feud to US courts

MUMBAI: The simmering feud between IndiGo’s founders has now reached the US courts, with co-founder Rahul Bhatia seeking a legal order from a Maryland court to retrieve correspondence from IndiGo independent director Anupam Khanna. Bhatia has alleged that Khanna has been “acting in concert” with co-founder Rakesh Gangwal.The “documentary and testimonial evidence”, specifically Khanna’s correspondence with Gangwal since July 2018, will be used in a separate case filed by Bhatia in the London Court of International Arbitration. Bhatia has accused Gangwal of breaching the shareholders’ agreement between them and of causing losses to him by making the dispute between them public in July 2019. The IndiGo shares fell 10.73% after the dispute broke in public, Bhatia has said. Further losses are expected to accrue as a result of Gangwal’s alleged misconduct, the petition said. The court has issued a subpoena to Khanna to produce the documents and also to allow a legal inspection of his premises.Bhatia and InterGlobe Enterprises (IGE) also filed a case against Gangwal in Florida’s Southern District Court, but the case was closed a day after it was filed. Reasons for the closure could not be ascertained immediately.ET has reviewed documents relating to the case. An email sent to an IGE spokesperson remained unanswered before the story went to press.Gangwal refused to comment as did Dheeraj Nair, Bhatia’s counsel in the London court case. Jennifer Guest, the counsel for the Bhatia camp in the Maryland case couldn’t be reached before the story went to press. Khanna is a resident of Maryland in the United States. According to the petition, documents filed by Bhatia and his IGE group, Gangwal in July 2018 demanded that Bhatia and his IGE group’s controlling rights in the airline be diluted, a contention which along with other snowballed into a public feud between the two partners who set up and developed India’s biggest airline by passengers.Khanna is accused of “acting in concert” with Gangwal on the basis of his emails that Gangwal himself uploaded on a website called governanceindia.com which he set up to give public updates of the ongoing differences with Bhatia.For example, emails sent by Khanna to IndiGo chairman M Damodaran in August 2019 supported Gangwal’s contention on the board structure being skewed in favour of the Bhatia camp. The email also had Khanna’s concerns on related party transactions — IndiGo’s deals with other companies affiliated to IGE such as hotels — which Gangwal had raised.In the London court case, Bhatia has alleged that Gangwal has breached the shareholders’ agreement “through a destructive and very public campaign to cause harm to the company and the members of the IGE group”.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/31r43ZX