Amid the fallout from Uber’s sexual harassment scandal, a new headache has emerged for the company: Recode is reporting that Amit Singhal, senior vice president of engineering at Uber, has resigned because he failed to disclose that he left Google a year prior after an internal investigation at there found a sexual harassment claim filed against him to be “credible.” That is definitely not the look the company needs right now.
According to Recode, Amit Singhal left Google a year ago even after he disputed the allegation to executives at the search engine.
“Harassment is unacceptable in any setting. I certainly want everyone to know that I do not condone and have not committed such behavior,” Singhal wrote to Recode’s Kara Swisher. “In my 20-year career, I’ve never been accused of anything like this before and the decision to leave Google was my own.”
But citing anonymous sources at Uber, Swisher said the ride-hailing giant conducted “extensive” background checks of him and didn’t uncover “any hint of the circumstances of his departure from Google.”
A spokesperson for Uber declined to comment when reached by Jalopnik.
Singhal was asked to resign after Recode explained the circumstances with Google and Singhal this week. Here’s the gist of what transpired, from Recode:
Indeed. According to multiple sources and internal notes read to me, after discussing the claims of an alleged encounter between Singhal and a female employee first with former Google HR head Laszlo Bock and also Google CEO Sundar Pichai in late 2015, he denied those claims at the time. He also apparently stated a number of times that there were two sides to every story.
But, after the Christmas holidays, he then decided to resign himself after a 15-year career there.
Sources said that Google was prepared to fire Singhal over the allegations, after looking into the incident, but that it did not have to do so after he resigned.
Sources said the female employee who filed the formal complaint against Singhal did not work for him directly, but worked closely with the search team. She also did not want to go public with the charges, which is apparently why Google decided to allow Singhal to leave quietly.
Amid the tumult for Uber, this latest revelation is well-worth a read, and can be found here.
Meanwhile, in what we in the business call A Continuously Shitty Fucking Month, The Verge obtained a string of emails that showed Uber’s petty dust-up with the California DMV over its self-driving pilot program was months in the making.
In what amounted to a debate over semantics and the definition of California’s self-driving law, the emails show Uber argued for months that it didn’t meet the legal definition for AV testing, sparking a back-and-forth that never concluded. When the company decided to launch its self-driving endeavor anyway, the DMV put the kibosh on the idea within a week.
Ever since, Uber’s had a ceaseless stream of bad news.