Ashneer Grover writes to RBI for probe into BharatPe’s shareholding: Report

Ashneer Grover, former director of BharatPe, has written to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) asking it to start a probe into the shareholding of the Peak XV-backed company. Grover, who resigned from BharatPe in March 2022, in a letter dated March 6, has told the bank regulator that BharatPe has deliberately “defrauded” it by bringing back Bhavik Koladiya, who was convicted of a wire fraud in the US, to the company’s cap table, after securing a bunch of licences.

Grover in his letter has asked RBI to look into whether the company’s board and investors had “warehoused” Koladiya’s shares for a specific period of time only to bring him back after the requisite approvals were received from the central bank, the Economic Times reported on Thursday.

Here, warehousing means the accumulation of shares for a period of time before an entity gets a significant chunk in the company. Here, the entity is Koladiya.

BharatPe is a joint-venture partner in Unity Small Finance Bank with the Centrum group. BharatPe has got an in-principle approval from the regulator for the payments aggregator business through its wholly owned subsidiary Resilient Payments.

Grover has also highlighted that if Koladiya was part of BharatPe’s cap table during the time of the licence application, would the regulator have deemed BharatPe fit for a 49% stake in Unity Small Finance Bank or even allowed it to acquire a controlling stake in non-banking finance company Liquiloans. 

BharatPe was founded in March 2018 by Shashvat Nakrani and Bhavik Koladiya with each owning 50% in the firm. Grover joined the firm as a third co-founder and board member in July 2018, and purchased 3,192 shares — 2,447 shares from Nakrani and 745 from Koladiya— for Rs 10 apiece. After the share transfer, the shareholding pattern of BharatPe changed. Koladiya had 42.5%, Grover had 31.9%, and Nakrani had 25.5%. 

In March 2022, Grover was ousted by the BharatPe board,

In December 2022, BharatPe filed a civil suit against Grover, his wife Madhuri Jain Grover, as well as his relatives and sought Rs 88.67 crore in damages. 

BharatPe filed a criminal complaint against Grover and his family with the Economic Offences Wing of the Delhi Police, alleging criminal breach of trust, conspiracy, cheating, forgery and destruction of evidence. 

Further, it filed an arbitration claim in Singapore to claw back restricted shares (1.4%) allotted to Grover and prevent him from using the title of a founder. In January 2023, Koladiya had sued Grover reclaiming the shares transferred in December 2018.