Indian entrepreneur missing, massive search underway

 Indian entrepreneur and Coffee Day Group founder V G Siddhartha went missing on Monday night from a river bridge in Mangaluru.

He is said to have left behind a note wherein he has apologised to employees at his firm for being “unable to build a profitable business model.”

The 58-year-old businessman is said to have been travelling to Sakleshpur via highway when he asked his driver to take him to a bridge in Mangaluru instead.

He then got out of the car and asked the driver to wait at the end of the bridge and only return when summoned. That was the last sighting of Siddhartha.

Mangaluru police is currently running point in the investigation and have launched a massive search and rescue operation.

Though there has been no official statement from Siddhartha’s family, many Indian news outlets are claiming that he may have committed suicide.

A letter purportedly written by him to the board of directors and everyone in the "Coffee Day family" surfaced on Tuesday morning in which he said he could not build a profitable business model despite the best efforts.

He also indicated " tremendous pressure" from some lenders and "a lot of harassment" from a senior income tax official which caused him a serious liquidity crunch. 

The first generation coffee entrepreneur hailed from a coffee growing family in Chikmagalur in Karnataka and is a post-graduate in Economics. The family is the largest individual coffee planter, owning about 15,000 acres of coffee estates.

Siddhartha opened his first Cafe Coffee Day outlet in August 1996 in Bengaluru’s most-visited shopping street, Brigade Road. The chain has grown to 1750 stores across India along with 60,000 vending machines, besides presence in Vienna, the Czech Republic, Malaysia, Nepal and Egypt.

He married the daughter of former Karnataka Chief Minister SM Krishna’s daughter, and they have two children.