Ashneer Grover writes to BharatPe demanding action against CEO Suhail Sameer and Rajnish Kumar

On April 6, an IT associate at BharatPe wrote on LinkedIn that he and other staffers had not received their salaries for March. To this, Grover replied asking BharatPe to look into the matter. His sister Aashima Grover also joined in, describing BharatPe’s top management as a “shameless bunch”, the next day. The conversation took a turn when Sameer responded,
“Tere bhai ne saara paisa chura liya (your brother stole all the money). Very little left to pay salaries.” Sameer, later on, apologised for his message.

In his letter shot off at Friday midnight, Grover alleged that Sameer was under the influence of ‘alcohol’ and ‘drugs’ when he put the said reply and that he should be put on ‘leave of absence’ immediately.

“As a board under the chairmanship of Rajnish Kumar has claimed to be the epitome of corporate governance, I would want to ask what action is the board going to take against Suhail Sameer? Going by precedents and self-proclaimed high standards of this board, the CEO should be immediately served a show cause notice for his despicable public behaviour and immediately put on leave of absence to manage the damage on the brand of the company,” read Grover’s mail to the company’s board, reviewed by ET.

He added that Sameer put his reply ‘in the wee hours of April 7, after a night of drunken debauchery’ at BharatPe’s offsite in Goa.

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In addition, Grover also demanded the resignation of BharatPe board chairman and veteran banker Rajnish Kumar, stating that under his leadership, the current management feels that they have ‘carte blanche from the board and its chairman to target him (Grover) and his family.

“Moreover the chairman Rajnish Kumar should immediately resign. The current incident clearly brings out the fact that Rajnish Kumar condoning the life threat to me by Bhavik Koladiya from his own house and all the planned media leaks leading to my resignation in self-respect, has further emboldened the current management to act as hooligans…” said Grover. ET reported earlier that Grover along with BharatPe’s Investors Sequoia Capital, BeeNext, cofounder Shashvat Nakrani,
had bought out Koladiya’s stake in the company.

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Grover in his letter on Friday said, “It also proves that in the governance review which was supposed to be all-encompassing, the chairman refused to look into the allegations made against Suhail altogether.”

A BharatPe spokesperson couldn’t be immediately reached out for a comment.

Grover had also previously
attacked Kumar in one of his letters to the board in February, saying the entire governance review was a “facade” and that it was “riddled with premeditation, bias and prejudice”.