Mumbai Designer Was In Financial Crisis Before Arnab’s Office Contract: Report

Mumbai: Republic TV Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami and two others were granted bail on Wednesday a week after being arrested in connection with a 2018 case of abetment to suicide.

Following the suicide of Mumbai interior designer Anvay Naik and his mother Kumud Naik on May 5, 2018, at their Alibaug bungalow in Maharashtra’s Raigad district, police found a suicide note which named Goswami, Neetish Sarda of Smartworks and Firoz Shaikh of IcastX/Skimedia, for allegedly failing to pay dues amounting to Rs 83 lakh, Rs 55 lakh and Rs 4 crore, respectively, to Anvay Naik’s company, Concorde Designs Pvt Ltd.

The case, which was closed by Raigad police last year, was reopened last month as fresh evidence was claimed to have been found. The arrests of the trio followed.

Documents accessed by ThePrint, however, revealed that the financial woes of Anvay Naik and his company were much deeper than the money the trio allegedly owed them.

The online newspaper said that Concorde was suffering heavy losses, and had debts close to Rs 20 crore as well as multiple disputes with tax authorities, by 2016 itself – before Goswami’s office contract.

The report further states that Anvay Naik was director and shareholder in a construction firm, co-owned by a local Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) functionary, before 2012. That company was removed from Registrar of Companies listing after suffering losses.

“Anvay Naik may have had ups and downs earlier and faced losses in his firm and due to his other business engagements, but he came out of it. He bounced back. In this case, we have evidence that there was a concerted effort to pressurise him, which seemed to be the final trigger,” Anvay Naik’s lawyer Vaibhav Karnik was quoted as saying.

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