Vashu Bhagnani's UK company owes £10m, 87% of it to a UAE firm

Vashu Bhagnani's British company owes £10,085,267.92, and £8,752,652.35 of that is owed to a single company registered in a free zone in Ras Al Khaimah.

That is 87% of the entire debt, sitting with one creditor in the United Arab Emirates. The figure comes from the company's own statement of affairs, signed on 3 September and filed at Companies House on 17 September. Nobody has reported it.

Pooja Entertainment UK Limited, company number 11357422, entered a creditors' voluntary liquidation on 8 September 2026, according to its Companies House record. Sandra Fender of Sanderlings LLP was appointed liquidator the same day. A creditors' voluntary liquidation is the insolvent route: the members resolve to wind the company up because it cannot pay what it owes. It is not something a tax authority does to a company. That would be a compulsory winding up, on a petition, and this is not one.

The resolution is signed by Vashu Lilaram Bhagnani as chair of the meeting of members, held at Unit B, 16-28 Bonnersfield Lane, Harrow. He is the company's sole director, appointed on 1 May 2020, and is listed as an Indian national.

Thirteen creditors, one of them enormous

Virtuso Production FZE, given as Business Centre, Rakez, Ras Al Khaimah, is down for £8,752,652.35 as a trade creditor. RAKEZ is the Ras Al Khaimah Economic Zone. No security is recorded against the debt, and the value of security held is entered as £0.00 for every creditor on the list. Being owed money is not an allegation against the creditor, and nothing here suggests any wrongdoing by Virtuso.

HM Revenue and Customs appears three times: £883,294.87 of VAT, £172,499.77 of interest and penalties on tax, and £10,661.59 of corporation tax. That is £1,066,456.23 to the taxman, about a tenth of the total.

Then there is everybody else. Eight British suppliers are owed £136,332.58 between them: Almas Global Productions of Harrow (£40,320.38), Pegasus Pictures of London (£31,108.19), DB Films and Animation, also of Harrow (£25,281.64), Big Portion International Location Caterers of Greenford (£25,000), AA Films UK (£10,500), Zaak Properties (£2,300), the estate agency Savills (£1,092) and the energy supplier E.On (£730.37). Luton Borough Council is owed £129,826.76 in rates.

A caterer and a location company are on the same list as a nine-figure production empire. They are expected to receive nothing.

What is left to pay them with

Nothing, on the company's own estimate.

The summary of assets puts investments at a book value of £7,324,795, debtors at £110,000 and cash at bank at £2,500. Against each one, in the column headed "Estimated to Realise", the entry is "Unknown". The line for estimated total assets available for preferential creditors reads NIL.

Below it the arithmetic runs one way. The estimated deficiency as regards unsecured creditors is £10,085,268, and after £460,001 of issued share capital the estimated total deficiency as regards members is £10,545,269. The schedule for employee creditors is blank, with a total of £0.00, so no staff are owed anything by this entity.

The company that is filed as dormant

All of this belongs to a company whose registered activity code at Companies House is 99999, the code for a dormant company.

It was incorporated on 11 May 2018 as Motioncloud Cinema Limited, became Divibunny Entertainment Limited that November, then Bunny and Divi Entertainment Limited in June 2020, and took the Pooja Entertainment name only in March 2021. Companies House began compulsory strike-off proceedings against it three years running, in October 2023, October 2024 and October 2025, each suspended and then discontinued once overdue accounts arrived. The accounts for the year to 31 March 2024 were not filed until November 2025.

The year it emptied itself

The accounts to 31 March 2026 were filed on 9 September, the day after the winding-up resolution. They are not dormant accounts. They are small-entity accounts under Section 1A of FRS 102, and they describe a company that spent its last full year emptying itself.

Every tangible fixed asset went. Land and buildings of £275,007 and computer equipment of £850,909, £1,125,916 at cost between them, were all disposed of during the year, taking the net book value from £793,427 to nothing. The average number of employees fell from three to none.

Debtors dropped from £2,233,168 to £203,052. Creditors falling due within one year dropped from £15,594,280 to £9,060,296. Net assets were negative in both years, at minus £5,236,414 in March 2025 and minus £1,516,589 in March 2026, so the company was balance-sheet insolvent a year and a half before anybody wound it up.

The investments did not move at all. Note 4 shows £7,324,795 of "other investments other than loans" at 1 April 2025, no additions, no disposals, and the identical £7,324,795 at 31 March 2026, carried at cost. The note does not say what the money is invested in. Five months later the liquidator wrote "Unknown" beside the same figure.

One number went the other way. The profit and loss account improved by £3,719,825 across the year, from a deficit of £5,696,414 to one of £1,976,589, at a company with no employees and no fixed assets left. Abridged accounts carry no profit and loss statement, so the filing does not show how that happened. The liquidator has a statutory duty to investigate how the deficiency arose and to report on the conduct of the company's director.

Twenty days later, Mumbai

On 28 September, Income Tax Department teams searched around 12 locations linked to Bhagnani, his daughter-in-law the actor Rakul Preet Singh, and Panorama Studios, Bollywood Hungama reported. A search was also carried out at the office of the director Ali Abbas Zafar.

Officials were examining sums remitted overseas under headings including film shoots, foreign distribution and production expenses, according to Gulf News. A search is an inspection of documents. No charge has been brought against Bhagnani, Singh or anyone else named, no findings have been announced, and no authority has drawn any link between those searches and the liquidation in Britain. This piece does not draw one either. It reports that both happened, twenty days apart, and that the second was on a public register the whole time.

Two days after the searches, Bhagnani was reported to have been admitted to hospital in London, asking to be left alone, per the Free Press Journal and India TV. The reason has not been disclosed and he has asked for privacy.

The debt that was already public

Pooja Entertainment's finances have been reported on for more than two years.

Bade Miyan Chote Miyan, with Akshay Kumar and Tiger Shroff, was made for a reported Rs 350 crore and took about Rs 90 crore worldwide, a global gross worth roughly 26% of the production budget before a rupee of marketing. Bollywood Hungama reported in June 2024 that Bhagnani had sold the company's seven-floor office to clear around Rs 250 crore owed to financiers and laid off about 80% of staff. Business Today and DNA carried the same account. Bhagnani disputed it, saying the building was being redeveloped rather than sold, Koimoi reported.

The Federation of Western India Cine Employees went through the contracts and concluded, in a statement reported by Devdiscourse, that "a substantial amount is owed to technicians, artists and vendors by the producer". FWICE said it wrote to Bhagnani after complaints from the Directors' Association, from Zafar and from the Mission Raniganj director Tinu Desai, sent the payment details, and got no resolution.

That was 2024, and it was about India. The British filing turns the same complaint into an audited column of figures with a total at the bottom.

Creditors have to submit their claims to Fender to be admitted to the liquidation. The next accounts for the company are not due at Companies House until 31 December 2027.