Ola Head of HR under scrutiny for fraud allegations
Cab aggregator Ola has launched an investigation against their HR Head and Chief Administrator Officer, Yugantar Saikia who had allegedly conspired with recruitment agencies, accepting payments for favoring them.
According to media sources, the estimated value of this fraud looks to be in few million dollars.
The SoftBank-backed company Ola has roped in one of the ‘Big Four’ auditing firms to investigate this potential recruitment fraud committed by Saikia. It is said that the audit firm that has been hired in to investigate the scam could examine the employment of over 1,000 people who were hired from such external agencies in question.
Saikia was appointed by Ola in February 2015 and was also given the additional charge of Chief Administrative Officer within few months. Coincidentally, that was just two months before the company announced a $400 Million Series E round of funding led by DST Global.
Before joining Ola as HR Head and Chief Administrative Officer, Saikia worked with Fair Isaac Corporation ( FICO ) as a Senior Director for the Asia Pacific Region. Before that, he had worked at American Express as Service Delivery Leader for the Global Infrastructure Optimisation division. Saikia was serving his notice period which was expected to be over by the end of March. However last week, his laptop was seized and he was asked to not report to work anymore.
An Ola spokesperson confirmed this development to the media stating, “There is an internal investigation which is currently on, and one cannot give further details at the moment.”