Amid the ongoing tussle between BharatPe MD and co-founder Ashneer Grover and the company’s board, the fintech start-up has appointed the deputy general counsel of its investor, Insight Partners, on its board.
The company’s regulatory filings show that John Bernard Weinstein has joined the BharatPe board to take the total number of board members to nine. Insight Partners is one of the early investors of BharatPe and holds about 10 per cent stake in the company.
This change in the BharatPe board comes on the heels of Grover writing to the board members, asking them to remove CEO Suhail Sameer from the board. Following this, BharatPe’s other co-founder, Shashvat Mansukhbhai Nakrani, said Sameer continues to enjoy his support.
“I have neither given my consent nor sought the removal of Suhail Sameer from the board of BharatPe. News reports suggesting these are incorrect. I can confirm that I was one of the two joint nominees in the appointment resolution of Suhail Sameer as the CEO and board member of BharatPe, and he continues to enjoy my support,” Nakrani said in an earlier media statement.
Even as the controversy continued to swirl, Ashneer Grover, speaking to a website, denied all allegations and said that he was being arm-twisted by the board to exit the company. He was quoted as saying that he would do so only if his 9.5 per cent stake was brought out at a valuation of $6 billion, indicating a pay-out of Rs 4,000 crore.
A preliminary report by international consulting firm Alvarez and Marsal (A&M), which was appointed to look into allegations of financial fraud by co-founder & Managing Director Ashneer Grover and his wife Madhuri Jain Grover, has indicated that there were indeed financial discrepancies.
A copy of the report, which was seen by BusinessLine, indicates that the fintech firm was said to be paying recruitment fees to a number of ‘consultants’ for employees recruited through them. In five such cases, employees have confirmed their joining date as the one mentioned in the vendor invoice, but they had no knowledge of being recruited or engaged through the said ‘consultants.’ However, BharatPe on February 4 denied receiving any interim or final release of the independent review done by Alvarez and Marsal (A&M).
Published on
February 09, 2022
