Saffron BPO:  Owners court battles in UK
By Shalini Singh

Last month, Saffron Global Services, a Gurgaon-based BPO with a capacity of 1000 Agents held a lavish Diwali function.  The chief guest was Mr. Rastogi,  CEO of Tulip UK, the London based parent company of saffron (www.connectsaffron.com) and Maple (sister concern of Saffron based at Noida). 

This party included a dance show similar to the famous dance show on Star TV .This included performances by a couple and group from each team and support departments. These great dance acts were judged by the Rastogi family.  The Winners were awarded a cash prize of Rs. 5000 and a gift pack.

What is not publicly known in India is that respected British newspaper Guardian had spent considerable resources investigating UK-based Mr. Rastogi.  In 2004, Guardian reported the following:

“Two of Britain's biggest suspected fraudsters, ordered by the courts to repay duped creditors $300m (£164m), have reinvented themselves as mobile phone salesmen negotiating deals to market and supply thousands of phones to UK users on behalf of Hutchison 3G, T-Mobile and O2.

Senior sales managers from at least one of the networks are understood to have had regular dealings at an individual level with Viren Rastogi and Anand Jain, without being aware of their background.

The two men are at the centre of investigations into a $400m fraud at RBG Resources, a London-based international metals trading firm they controlled until it went bust two years ago.

The mobile networks have granted reseller licences to Tulip (UK) Ltd, where Mr Rastogi works, and where his wife Sarika Rastogi and mother Shakuntala Gupta are major shareholders. Tulip uses hundreds of telephone sales staff in and around Delhi in India to cold call potential UK customers. It is thought to sell several thousand phones each month and to be one of the fastest growing cold call telecoms marketing firms operating in Britain.”

Obviously, set backs in 2004 have not stopped them from running a flourishing business in India.  Mr. Rastogi is not with Tulip (UK) in any official capacity.  His immediate family runs Tulip (UK).  But the real power rests with him.

Techgoss note:  In 2005,  the same Guardian newspaper reported about the bankruptcy of Mr. Rastogi as following:  “Viren Rastogi and Anand Jain, the former metal traders whose company collapsed three years ago amid allegations of fraud amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, have been declared bankrupt with personal debts of £180m. It is thought to be one of the largest bankruptcy orders issued against individuals since the £400m bankruptcy in 1992 of Kevin Maxwell, son of the late media tycoon Robert Maxwell.”