The Kotak Mahindra Group and fintech startup BharatPe founder Ashneer Grover have been locked in a legal battle over the lender's alleged failure to provide financing for the Nykaa initial public offering but the spat came to light when a purported abusive phone call Grover made to a Kotak employee over the issue was leaked earlier this week.
Kotak Mahindra has said that it is pursuing appropriate legal action against the “inappropriate language” used by Grover in the audio clip, even as the authenticity of the clip is yet to be ascertained.
What happened?
Grover and his wife Madhuri Grover sent a legal notice to Kotak Mahindra Bank's managing director and chief executive officer Uday Kotak and senior management on October 31, 2021, for failing to secure financing and allocation of shares in the Nykaa IPO.
The notice seeks damages for the gains Grover and his wife would have made after subscribing to shares worth Rs 500 crore in the company besides Rs 1 lakh towards the cost of the legal notice.
The scathing legal notice alleged that the bank denied Grover the IPO financing at the “eleventh hour” even though his team had informed the bank of the investment opportunity “more than a month in advance of the IPO”.
“To the shock and surprise of our clients on October 28, 2021, after having repeatedly assured our clients that the shares o FSN (Nykaa’s parent firm) would be allotted to them, Kotak informed our clients that it would not be able to provide financing for the Nykaa IPO,” Grover’s counsel wrote to the top lender, according to reports.
Kotak Mahindra has termed the IPO financing failure allegation as blatantly false and incorrect, clarifying that it provided the service to BharatPe CEO Suhail Sameer.
This notice came to the fore on January 5 when an anonymous Twitter account leaked a conversation between Grover and a Kotak Mahindra employee, where Grover hurled expletives and death threats for missing out on the Nykaa IPO gains due to the bank.
Grover tweeted on January 6 that the audio is fake, after the startup community slammed his inappropriate language in the audio clip, adding that a “scamster” was trying to extort a huge sum of money from him in bitcoins using this audio clip. He later deleted the tweet from his timeline and told The Economic Times that since the audio clip was removed from SoundCloud and Twitter, there was no need to keep the tweet on his profile.
"Appropriate legal action is being pursued. We would like to confirm that there is no breach or violation by the Kotak Group in any manner whatsoever,” the bank said in a statement.
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