Cox & Kings: fictitious sales and siphoned sale proceeds ended a 261-year travel brand

Cox & Kings traced its lineage to 1758, making it one of the world's oldest travel brands. The Kerkar family bought the Indian business in 1981, listed it in a $110 million IPO in 2009, and went on an acquisition spree — including UK's Holidaybreak for about ₹2,300 crore in 2011. By 2018 the debt had grown heavy enough that the company sold its European education-tour business for £467 million (₹4,387 crore), telling the market the proceeds would cut debt.

The deleveraging never happened. In June 2019 the company stopped paying: ₹150 crore of a ₹200 crore loan went unpaid, a ₹30 crore default followed in September, and IATA terminated its ticketing licence. In October 2019, NCLT Mumbai admitted an insolvency petition over the ₹30 crore default; lenders eventually filed claims of ₹5,500 crore, Yes Bank alone ₹3,642 crore — a sanction the ED later said its chief Rana Kapoor had driven past lending norms.

The forensic audit explained the defaults. PwC found ₹4,367 crore of the education-sale proceeds siphoned for unauthorised, promoter-level uses. Between FY2016 and FY2019 the company booked ₹11,858 crore of sales: ₹6,400 crore went to its own group firm Ezeego, of which ₹679 crore was ever collected, and ₹3,908 crore went to 15 customers that did not exist — site visits found no travel agencies at the addresses. Reported debt was ₹2,000 crore against a real ₹3,600 crore, and an 'audited' subsidiary statement had arrived from the email address of an employee who had left the UK firm in 2016.

Lenders filed ₹5,500 crore in claims (Yes Bank ₹3,642 crore); NCLT pushed the company into insolvency in October 2019; CFO and internal auditor arrested in 2020

A quarter of six years' revenue was booked to customers that never existed — receivables had become the business's hidden funding line.

Five different explanations of where the £467 million went, given to different parties, is what turned a liquidity story into a fraud finding.

Reported debt of ₹2,000 crore against a real ₹3,600 crore: understated leverage buys time and pays for it in the end.

The biggest lender's own sanction process was bypassed at the top — lax credit governance is the fraudster's multiplier.

Receivables owed by customers who don't exist fund nothing. When booked revenue runs far ahead of cash in the bank, ask whose invoices fill the gap — before the lender's forensic team does.

The Enforcement Directorate arrested CFO Anil Khandelwal and internal auditor Naresh Jain in October 2020, alleging ₹1,100 crore had been diverted to an unrelated stressed firm and that the two had acquired ₹63 crore of mortgaged property through their own entity. The group never re-emerged from insolvency: the UK business went to Abercrombie & Kent, and in May 2024 the rights to the Indian brand were bought by Singapore's Wilson & Hughes through an NCLT-supervised process — a 266-year-old name outliving the company that broke it.