Delhi HC asks Ashneer to maintain decorum in a plea filed by BharatPe

The Delhi High Court on Monday asked BharatPe's former Managing Director Ashneer Grover's counsel to advise his client (Grover) to maintain decorum following his termination from the fintech company while hearing a plea filed by the company seeking orders to restrain Grover and his kin from making defamatory statements against the company, and other reliefs.

Justice Navin Chawla said: "This social media has brought us down to this level. Ask him to maintain decorum."

The court made its remark after seeing some tweets and allegations made against BharatPe and its staff by Grover. The court was informed that some of those utterances contain language that prevents their repetition in open court.

The court then ordered: "Issue notice on defendants' application to the plaintiff. Notice accepted. Three more weeks time granted to the defendants to file their responses to the interim applicants. Written statements to be filed in response to the main suit as well."

On December 8, the HC had issued summons to Grover and his wife and others and gave them two weeks' time to file replies to the interim relief application filed by the company.

In its suit, running into 2,800 pages, BharatPe has claimed damages worth Rs 88.67 crore from Grover, his wife, and his brother for alleged cheating and misappropriation of funds.

The damages sought include a claim for payment made against the invoices of non-existent vendors amounting to Rs 71.7 crore, a claim for Rs 1.66 crore penalty paid to GST authorities, payments totalling Rs 7.6 crore made to vendors purportedly providing recruitment services, payments of Rs 1.85 crore made to a furnishings company, payments for personal expenditures up to Rs 59.7 lakh and payment of Rs 5 crore damages for loss of reputation to the company caused by tweets and other statements made by them.

In its suit, the fintech company claimed that a Rajasthan-based travel company had raised invoices for foreign tours twice, once for Grover and his wife and second time for their children. The family also used the company's funds to travel abroad.

The suit further claimed that the Grovers used the company funds to pay the rent and security deposit of their posh duplex and for home appliances, too. The duplex was first taken over by Grovers as the company's guest house but eventually they started living there, the suit claimed.

BharatPe had filed an interim relief application seeking disclosure of assets of Grover and his family members, and an interim injunction restraining them from making defamatory/derogatory statements about the fintech company, its directors, employees and/or publicising the same.

The application also sought direction to defendants to delete/remove within a period of five days all statements, tweets, social media posts, books, re-tweets, hashtags, videos, press conferences, interviews, comments, etc., made against the company and orders granting liberty to BharatPe to approach all social media platforms, media organisations, publications, websites, blogs, etc., to seek deletion/removal of all such material.

BharatPe had approached the HC months after Grover and his wife were dismissed from the company over allegations of misappropriation of funds.

Claiming BharatPe's investigations were illegal, Grover had also initiated arbitration before the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC) only to lose the dispute and was sacked from the company days later.