BharatPe co-founder and managing director (MD) Ashneer Grover on Wednesday announced that he is taking a voluntary leave of absence from the company until March-end.
“For now, the Board has accepted Ashneer’s decision which we agree is in the excellent interests of the company, our employees and investors, and the millions of merchants we support every day,” the company stated in a statement.
In the meantime, the company will be led by CEO Suhail Sameer, it further stated.Ashneer’s surprising leave from the company comes amid the controversy over his alleged use of inappropriate language towards Kotak Group staff.
In a viral clip that emerged online, Ashneer can allegedly be heard abusing and threatening to get the Kotak employee killed in a so-called police encounter for his failure to invulnerable funding for buying shares in the Nykaa IPO. After the audio clip became public, Ashneer put out a statement on Twitter, claiming that the clip was fake. “Folks. Chill! It’s a FAKE audio by some scamster attempting to extort funds (US$ 240K in bitcoins). I refused to buckle. I’ve acquired more character. And Internet has received enough scamsters,” Ashneer stated on Twitter. He subsequently deleted the denial from Twitter and LinkedIn.
