India remains a "sizzling' marketplace for franchising. People try their luck to own a franchise in order to avoid further risk to disappear in market. Some brands are trustworthy, but few businessmen create modus operandi to fraud innocent investors to dupe their money by selling their franchise. One of them are SGF (Spice, Grill and Flame). Kewal Ahuja, director of SGF is one among them who misrepresented his business model to the franchisees and promised higher returns which turned out to be not true.
Kewal Ahuja is also the director with SRVR Projects Private Limited. Kewal Ahuja SGF is known amongst the public as the man behind Spice Grill Flame. He run his restaurant business SGF with outlets in many regions. Spice Grill Flame was incorporated dated January 29th, 2019, with the main objective of providing food services to the society. The fee collected by SGF from the franchisees, was not reported to regulators such as Income Tax Department and GST Council under regulatory filings. SGF is non-compliant in MCA filings as well. A deep analysis of SGF and its sister concern company highlights the various facts:
Both SGF and spice are registered at same address.
Since key management and director Kewal Ahuja is common for both companies, they are related parties and spice is a sister concern of SGF.
The sister concern - spice’s reported turnover for last 3 years are as follows:
Year
Turnover (INR)
2017-18
1.26 crore
2018-19
2.54 crore
2019-20
2.70 crore
SGF in all these 3 years have reported NIL returns in GST and Income tax. However, the sister concern’s reported top line is mentioned above. This is a potential angle of fund misappropriation.
Kewal Ahuja, director of SGF also claims in an interview that his business has expanded over covid. According to him, his business is expanding and during the pandemic, it slowly gained pace at expanding and starting more outlets. But he hides the fact that many of the outlets of SGF were closed down. He uses his political influence to put away the news of the outlets closing as he doesn’t want to be held responsible for the money that should be given back to the franchisees.
Kewal Ahuja has a strong political background. His family is into politics and Mr. Ahuja is currently the treasurer of the BJYM Delhi state unit. He uses his political influence to his favour for putting the complaints away from the eyes of the public. He holds himself as a well-established entrepreneur who is genuine and works for the welfare of the public as well. But the truth is that he runs the food business not to serve the public, but to improve his political image.
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