Byju’s Founder Says Missing $533 Millions Went To Legitimate Purpose

(Bloomberg) --The founder of Byju’s, a once high-flying Indian education company that defaulted on its US debts, denied that he orchestrated a scheme to fraudulently transfer $533 million away from lenders.

On the day a judge was set to consider the lenders’ fraudulent transfer claims against his company, Byju Raveendran outlined for the first time in court his explanation for what happened to the money, which lenders have been trying to track down for more than a year.

The company got the $1.2 billion loan nearly three years ago as it planned to use most of the proceeds on an international expansion, Raveendran claimed.

“However, just as we were poised to see the returns on these strategic investments, we were hit by a liquidity crunch,” he said in a filing Wednesday morning in US Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware.

The $533 million — that lenders allege was transfered offshore to entities linked to the founder — was used for a “legitimate commercial purpose,” Raveendran argued in his filing.

Lenders have long considered the so-called Alpha Funds their best shot at getting back some of the $1.2 billion they loaned the company when Covid-era lockdowns turned the online-education company into one of India’s most valuable startups.

The two sides have been fighting in state and federal courts for more than a year about what happened to the money. The founder told lender advisers in a meeting that “the money is someplace the lenders will never find it,” creditors said in a court filing.

In the Wednesday declaration, Raveendran claimed he never used those words.

The entire case of fraud and siphoning of money “is based on one statement that their representative wrote on a paper napkin and attributed to me,” he said. During the meeting with the advisers, he wanted to explain to the lenders that the funds “would be utilized for their intended purpose.”

Raveendran said that after raising the loan, Byju’s needed to use the funds for its international expansion as quickly as possible and entered into agreements with a OCI Ltd., a UK-incorporated firm that provided procurement services for IT equipment and advertising.

When Byju’s was unable to reimburse what it owed, OCI exercised its “right of set-off” against the Alpha Funds.

“Neither I, nor any of the founders of T&L (the borrowing unit of Byju’s) has personally received any portion of the Alpha Funds or any of the funds disbursed under the credit agreement,” he said in the filing.

The US bankruptcy case is BYJU’s Alpha Inc., 24-10140, US Bankruptcy Court District of Delaware (Wilmington).