Jhunjhunwala-backed Akasa hires former IndiGo executive Ankur Goel as CFO

The airline is reportedly in final negotiations with aircraft manufacturer Boeing for an order of up to 100 737 Max jets

Akasa, the airline founded by former Jet Airways CEO Vinay Dube, has hired Ankur Goel, former head of IndiGo’s treasury and investor relations, as its Chief Financial Officer.

The airline, backed by ace investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and which has former IndiGo president Aditya Ghosh on board, is in final negotiations with aircraft manufacturer Boeing for an order of up to 100 737 Max jets. It aims to start operations by summer of 2022.

Goel, with over 16 years of experience in various fields of finance, was a core member of the team that led IndiGo’s public listing in 2015 raising Rs 3,000 crore followed by a Qualified Institutional Placement (QIP) in 2017, which raised around Rs 4,000 crore.

While Jhunjhunwala has invested Rs 247.50 crore in the airline, another big name of Dalal street, Madhav Bhatkuly, founder of investment fund New Horizon, has also invested around Rs 6 crore in the company.

Bhatkuly is known for identifying big companies at early stage and was among the first institutional investors in many leading names of India Inc like----Sun Pharma, Godrej Consumer, Axis Bank and Apollo Hospitals.

With Goel’s hiring, the airline has now completed hiring of its top management. While promoter Vinay Dube will be the CEO, Praveen Iyer will be the Chief Commercial Officer. Iyer, a former colleague of Dubey at Jet Airways, is one of the founding members of the team along with Neelu Khatri who has been appointed as head of corporate affairs and was most recently president of Honeywell Business in India.

It has named Bhavin Joshi as senior vice-president of finance and aircraft leasing and has recruited Anand Srinivasan as chief information officer. Srinivasan used to head revenue management at Go Air.

Former Jet Airways executives Belson Coutinho, Adam Voss, Ajit Baghchandani will head marketing, engineering, inflight services respectively.

A person in know of things said that till the time the company starts generating revenue, it has decided to compensate employees through sweat equity. Sweat equity is a non-monetary benefit that a company's stakeholders give rather than a monetary contribution. This is offered normally in start-ups where employees receive stock or stock options, becoming part-owners of the firm, in return for accepting salaries, which are lower than industry standards.

While demand for air travel has hit globally, India’s aviation industry is at greater risk of delayed recovery. That’s not deterring Jhunjhunwala though. “I think some of the incremental players may not recover,” he recently told a TV channel.

When asked why he is investing in a new airline, Jhunjhunwala said that for the culture of a company to be low cost, one needs to start fresh. “I am very bullish on India’s aviation sector demand,” he said.