Uber executive, linked to an old harassment claim, resigns

Amit Singhal is on the board of two Indian start-ups - Paytm and GooQi

A little more than a week after Uber faced stinging accusations that it had ignored female employees’ complaints of sexual harassment, the company dismissed the head of its engineering efforts for failing to disclose a sexual harassment claim from his previous job.
 
The executive, Amit Singhal, joined Uber last month after overseeing Google’s search efforts in a 15-year career at that company. He was asked to resign on Monday by Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive.
 
Singhal is on the board of two Indian start-ups — Paytm and GooQi. The former Google engineer is an investor and on the board of fitness tracking company Gooqi. Last October, he joined the board of Paytm.  The move came after Uber learned that Singhal did not disclose the circumstances of his departure from Google, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not allowed to speak on private personnel issues and asked for anonymity.

 

The swift dismissal of Singhal, a high-profile hire who signaled Uber’s ability to attract the technology industry’s most sought-after executives, comes at a particularly inopportune time for Uber, which is struggling with complaints that a rough-and-tumble culture has allowed sexual harassment to go unpunished. And it may be an indication of how the company is shifting to deal with future problems.
 
The former Uber engineer Susan Fowler and other current and former employees have claimed that the company’s human resources officials repeatedly ignored harassment claims about employees who were “top performers.”
 
Uber asked Eric H Holder Jr., who served as attorney general under President Obama, to investigate those claims. He is joined by the media mogul Arianna Huffington, a member of Uber’s board of directors, and Tammy Albarran, a partner at Mr. Holder’s law firm, Covington and Burling.

 
Last week, the Uber investors Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein wrote in an open letter to the company that they were frustrated with how Uber had handled its culture issues and that they had “hit a dead end in trying to influence the company quietly from the inside.”
 
The issue involving Singhal dates to 2015, when he was still at Google. The search giant deemed an employee’s claim of sexual harassment against Singhal “credible” in an internal investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter who declined to be identified because they were not allowed to speak on the matter. Singhal’s resignation from Uber was first reported by the technology news website Recode.                                                                                                                                                     ©2017 The New York Times News Service