Sheena murder: Indrani and Peter siphoned off company money, says secret witness

Indrani and Peter Mukerjea; (below) Sheena Bora — File Photo

Mumbai: The secret witness in the Sheena Bora murder case has revealed that Indrani and Peter Mukerjea siphoned money off their company through kickbacks and parked it in unknown bank accounts abroad.

Ravina Kohli, the secret witness and former CEO of Star News, has called Indrani a schemer, manipulator, and a lady of dominant nature.

The Hindu has a copy of her four-page statement with some portions being truncated. It reads, “At the time of Indrani’s marriage to Peter, she was providing maximum human resources to Star. I came to know from my sources that Indrani had manipulated this recruitment contract from Star Channel through Peter by throwing a threat of poaching to the media company. Peter was allowing Indrani to interfere in the affairs of the company so much so that though she was not on the company payrolls, she used to influence all major decisions of Peter.”

Peter called his wife his retirement plan, said Ms. Kohli. “Once I had an occasion to interact with Peter about Indrani. During the discussion, Peter mentioned about Indrani as his retirement plan. It was the reason that she was being promoted by Peter in media business circles. Indrani was taking advantage of his power for her personal benefit. Due to this, a lot of unrest was generated in the company. In 2006-07, Peter resigned from Star TV and floated a media company along with Indrani and named it M/s INX Media. Although the planning and execution was done by Peter, he kept Indrani as the face of the company whereas he used to run the day-to-day functioning,” says her statement. Ms. Kohli has also said that Vir Sanghvi had joined INX company, but he resigned within a year due to the dictatorial attitude of Indrani.

The statement concludes: “I also learnt through electronic media sources that Indrani and Peter have siphoned the money of their company through kickbacks and parked it in some unknown bank accounts abroad, may be in HSBC Singapore or Hong Kong. I came to know that Indrani and Peter used the company money to receive kickbacks from dummy production companies.”