Know reasons behind Ashneer Grover’s exit from BharatPe after long corporate battle

Ashneer Grover, who is the co-founder of BharatPe, has resigned from the company’s Managing Director position just days after his wife, Madhuri Jain Grover, was sacked from the fintech company on allegations of financial irregularities.

Ashneer Grover, who has come in the public eye after being one of the main judges in the show Shark Tank India, sent BharatPe his resignation letter on Tuesday. Before this, Grover was on a leave from the company for one month, during which his wife was fired from BharatPe.

In his resignation letter, which is dated March 1, Grover wrote that the merchant payment company’s core team has been leveraging his personal network to scale up their payments business and later treated him in “the most disgraceful manner”.

Grover’s resignation letter reads, “Am I perfect? As every other human being does, I am sure I have my follies. I have been told that I am too straight forward [sic], headstrong, and have very demanding standards when it comes [to] work. But it is these qualities that have resulted in BharatPe’s exponential growth in becoming an industry behemoth.”

After the prolonged corporate battle between him and the senior board members of the company, Grover wrote that he has been embroiled in “baseless and targeted attacks” against him and his family, citing this as the reason behind his exit from the company.

He further wrote, “From being celebrated as the face of Indian entrepreneurship and an inspiration to the Indian youth to build their own businesses, I am now wasting myself fighting a long, lonely battle against my own investors and management. Unfortunately, in this battle, the management has lost of what is actually at stake – BharatPe.”

Meanwhile, Grover remains the single largest individual shareholder in the company at the moment, the board members and him are in talks of buying out his share, which stands at currently 9.5 percent, which was valued at over Rs 1900 crores in August last year.

This development comes just a week after Grover’s wife, Madhuri Jain Grover, was sacked from BharatPe for alleged misappropriation of funds on her end. Just hours after being sacked, she called out the senior members of the company, alleging a “sexist and misogynistic” working environment.

Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani founded fintech company BharatPe in the year 2018, while Suhail Sameer is the current CEO of the company. BharatPe facilitates payments for merchants through bank transfers and UPI free of cost.