NEW YORK, May 20 (Reuters) – BlackRock (BLK.N), opens new tab was sued for $20 million by a whistleblowing former vice president who said it fired him after he objected to a colleague’s self-dealing, and was forced to shut down a search engine for monitoring client discussions about illegal investments, including in China.
In a complaint on Saturday, Hamdan Azhar said the world’s largest asset manager ordered him in March 2022 to stop work on Trend Spotter, which he had developed, and transfer his projects to Rightpoint, where the husband of former boss Tiffany Perkins-Munn worked.
The Brooklyn resident said he was fired two months later after objecting persistently to a $2 million contract that BlackRock awarded Rightpoint before Perkins-Munn’s own resignation, calling it “illegal self-dealing.”
He also said his new boss Riaz Hakkim refused to escalate concerns about client discussions that Trend Spotter could have tracked, and whether its revelations aligned with BlackRock’s public disclosures to investors and regulators.
Source: REUTER
