By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) – BlackRock was sued for $20 million by a whistle-blowing former vice president who said the asset manager fired him after he disabled a search engine that could monitor clients’ discussions about illegal investments, including in China.
In a complaint on Saturday, Hamdan Azhar said BlackRock 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 his former boss Tiffany Perkins-Munn worked.
The Brooklyn native said he was fired two months later after persistently objecting to a $2 million contract BlackRock awarded to Rightpoint before Perkins-Munn himself resigned, calling it “illegal self-dealing.”
He also said his new boss Riaz Hakkim refused to escalate concerns about illegal investments that Trend Spotter could have tracked, and whether its disclosures were consistent with BlackRock’s public disclosures to investors and regulators.
Azhar said he began developing Trend Spotter in March 2021 as a “hackathon” project, and it “gained widespread attention within BlackRock.” The New York-based company ended March with $10.5 trillion in assets under management.
BlackRock had no immediate comment Monday.
Last summer, the Chinese Communist Party’s bipartisan House Select Committee began seeking information on whether BlackRock and index provider MSCI facilitated investments in blacklisted Chinese companies.
In April, the commission found that Wall Street, through investments in index funds, funneled $6.5 billion in 2023 to 63 Chinese companies identified by the US government for their support of Chinese military and human rights abuses.
BlackRock and MSCI denied wrongdoing and said they comply with U.S. laws.
Azhar said he joined BlackRock in February 2020 as head of data science for global marketing.
His lawsuit in New York State District Court in Manhattan seeks $10 million in compensatory and punitive damages for violating state labor law.
Perkins-Munn and Hakkim are also defendants and now work at JPMorgan Chase and Fidelity Investments, respectively, according to the complaint.
Neither company immediately responded to requests for comment. Azhar’s attorney did not immediately respond to a similar request.
The case is Azhar v. BlackRock Inc et al, Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
