BENGALURU: Top
SoftBank
executive
Rajeev Misra
had launched a smear campaign against two other high ranking executives of Indian origin —
Nikesh Arora
and
Alok Sama
— at the Japanese telecom and investment giant, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The tactics included a shareholder campaign to get them removed, planting of negative news stories on them, and even a honeytrap to blackmail, said the report.
The developments come at a time when SoftBank’s Vision Fund has suffered setbacks on a number of its investments, like WeWork, and activist firm Elliott Management has become a shareholder in the firm. A former
Deutsche Bank
executive, Misra joined SoftBank in 2014 and is right now the CEO of the $100-billion Vision Fund, besides also being on the board of the company.
Arora had resigned as president and heir apparent at SoftBank in 2016 after an internal investigation found the charges against him to be false. A former top Google executive, Arora had cited differences in the timeline of succession with SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son as the reason for his departure.
Sama, who came in as Arora’ s deputy and helped the SoftBank founder steer his biggest deals — like the $32-billion purchase of UK’s ARM Holdings, and $59-billion merger of US telcos Sprint and T-Mobile — left in April last year, as TOI had reported.
“These are old allegations which contain a series of falsehoods that have been consistently denied,” a spokesman for Misra said. “Mr. Misra did not orchestrate a campaign against his former colleagues.” A SoftBank spokesperson said, “For several years, we have investigated a campaign of falsehoods against SoftBank Group and certain former employees in an attempt to identify those behind it. SoftBank will be reviewing the inferences made by The Wall Street Journal.”
The WSJ report said Misra joined hands with an Italian businessman Alessandro Benedetti, who previously worked with private intelligence operatives and computer hackers, and also made a payment of $500,000 to him for targeting Arora and Sama. Benedetti’s effort to honey-trap Arora with one or multiple women did not succeed in Tokyo, the report added.
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