After weeks of mudslinging and a highly-public drama surrounding BharatPe co-founder Ashneer Grover, a report has now claimed that the Shark Tank India judge’s gradually increasing lavish lifestyle was an eyesore for many employees at the fintech start-up.
New claims of Grover purchasing a Porsche and spending almost a crore ($1,30,000) on a dining room table have been reported by Bloomberg, quoting BharatPe employees. The staff said Grover and his wife Madhuri upgraded their modest home for a rented penthouse and renovated other property. Grover apparently told multiple employees about his expensive purchases.
Grover, who resigned as Managing Director last week, has since denied all claims regarding misappropriation of funds and hit out at the company for treating founders as ‘slaves’. His wife Madhuri was sacked in February for allegedly using company funds for personal use such as beauty treatments and vacations.
“The only thing lavish about me is my dreams and ability to achieve them against all odds through hard work and enterprise,” Ashneer Grover had told Bloomberg rubbishing claims about his glitzy lifestyle. He had even put out a LinkedIn post where he shared a photograph of a mattress on the floor that he claimed he was sleeping in while on the road securing funding for BharatPe.
Problems started plaguing the company since 2020, around the time when the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the economy. BharatPe’s office remained open and a female executive who joined the start-up that year said she was shocked that masks weren’t mandatory in the premises. Only a handful of the company’s 70 or so employees wore them, Bloomberg quoted the employee adding that Ashneer Grover chided her for making Covid an issue and influencing staff.
Just a few weeks into the job, the veteran executive was fired citing reasons like she had ‘emotional baggage’.
Madhuri Grover was also not very easy to work with and several former and current employees were against her working style, Bloomberg reported.
She reportedly threatened a colleague with salary deductions for using the company printer and even blasted people for the amount of coffee they consumed at work. She also had problems with other minor things like prices of gifts for merchant promotions, employees claim.
Ashneer Grover was also asked to hire an experienced chief financial officer, but he rejected candidate after candidate, one employee said. The role is still vacant.
Ashneer Grover was first sent on leave following allegations of using abusive language against Kotak Mahindra Bank staff, which he denied.
Grover then lost an arbitration that he had filed against the company's investigation against him, with an emergency arbitrator holding that there was no ground to stop governance review at the firm.
In a statement, BharatPe said it “reserves all rights to take further legal action against him and his family… As a result of his misdeeds, Mr. Grover is no longer an employee, a founder, or a director of the company.”
The split in the company has put start-up work culture in the limelight.
“If you expect that someone will create a $6 billion dollar business in less than four years and want everything to be perfect, including culture, sorry just not going to happen,” Grover said in a February interview with Moneycontrol. “Fast growth will come at some cost, no?”
His world came crumbling down soon after.
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