Nearly a week after Stayzilla co-founder and CEO Yogendra Vasupal was granted bail by Madras HC, Vasupal took to a post on Medium to thank everyone for their help and further breaking down the issue between Stayzilla and its vendor Jig Saw Solutions.
While starting off with thanking all family and investors for their sincere support, Vasupal has given a detailed background to his relationship with Aditya CS of Jig Saw Solutions and the issue around the campaign where Stayzilla claimed deficiency of services. “It is my duty now to add more context and information to assure you that your support was well-placed,” Vasupal said in the post.
He started off with the beginning of interaction between Stayzilla and Aditya back in 2014, where, according to him, Aditya was very persistent with his ideas and follow ups to work with Stayzilla. It was around October 2015 that Aditya approached Stayzilla for a chance to present his media plan for a large burst of advertising Stayzilla was planning for the end of 2015.
“The campaigns started in December third week. We went along with his plan with his selection of the location sent to us,” Vasupal said in his post.
However, Vasupal claims that when Stayzilla took additional steps to validate the start and end data pictures of campaigns executed by Aditya, it found clear evidence of forgery in many of the pictures that we sent following which Vasupal called Aditya in for a discussion.
“After a 2 hour meeting, I found that there had been no recce done by him and the only means of validation for the spots selected by his company was through photos of sites taken,” he said after which Vasupal decided to look at the spots himself and asked Aditya to stop all campaigns.
Upon doing a recce of the campaign sites himself, Vasupal says that he found that the wrong audience was being targeted through poor site locations and that Stayzilla was paying premium rates for absurdly low value sites.
Highlighting another loophole in services from the vendor’s side, Vasupal says that no official email IDs were used by the media agency to set up the recce. This wavered his confidence further in Jig Saw’s work. He also said that invoices were from Jig Saw instead of the media agency. He further added that Stayzilla never authorized this change in terms of who raises the invoice. Vasupal has even furnished invoices and email exchanges between Stayzilla and Jig Saw to back his claims.
Vasupal further says that lawyers informed them that making payments without these clarifications could lead to Stayzilla being accused of being hand in glove with Aditya.
And despite of requesting for proof, Vasupal says ‘inconsistently edited pictures’ were given as proof of delivery. “We kept finding newer and newer examples every-time we looked... Sachit now also asked for the original images as taken from the camera in addition to the other three requests” he said.
And instead of providing proofs, Vasupal claims that Aditya started getting more aggressive in asking for disputed payments. And this back and forth on presenting proof went on till December 2, 2016.
Post that, Vasupal claims that goons entered the office and created a havoc post which Stayzilla suspended all discussions and payments with Jig Saw till Aditya apologized.
It was after this that, according to Vasupal, Aditya beginning threatening CFO Sachit Singhi and Vasupal. However, they did not file any complaints against Aditya.
While in Prison
Vasupal says that while in prison, investors too offered to settle the amount to help him out. “I told them that I will be remiss in my duty if I pay up now with a gun to my head,” he wrote adding that cash was never a constraint in Jig Saw’s case.
Vasupal says that he is willing to forgive and forget the entire episode if Aditya provides all the requested proof for every campaign that they worked on 2014.
“I urge him to provide the requested information to all of us. And I am sure we all will be there to help him if he faces any issues with downstream vendors declining to provide the same to him. Won’t we? In the meanwhile, I will be looking to take this false criminal case filed against us to its logical conclusion,” he wrote in closing.
Aditya CS has not yet responded to The News Minute’s queries on Vasupal’s claims