Delhi HC directs Ashneer Grover to remove tweets against BharatPe, SBI chairman

The Delhi High Court on Friday directed former BharatPe MD Ashneer Grover to take down his tweet against the company and former SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar within 48 hours. The court asked  Grover to delete his tweet in which he called SBI chairman “petty people”. 

In its order, the court observed that the entrepreneur cannot destroy BharatPe's reputation and his tweet on SBI chairman was “completely avoidable.”

It added that the tweet was nothing but an innuendo towards BharatPe’s chairperson, who is a former SBI chairman, Bar and Bench reported.

On March 12, 2024, Grover had posted on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) against the company and alluding to Kumar, calling them “petty people".

The court said that Grover “cannot destroy the company’s reputation", adding that his post about Kumar was “completely avoidable" and is “nothing but an innuendo". Notably, Kumar is the BharatPe Board's chairperson.

Last week, Ashneer Grover wrote to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) asking the regulator to initiate an investigation into the shareholding of BharatPe. 

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.