A Sexual Harassment Accused Executive From Google Received Rs 313 Crore As “Exit Package”

Amit Singhal retired when he was the Senior Vice President of Google in 2016. At that time, he was also the head of search operations of Google. The incident wasn’t due to his age, by all means, it was instead because of his being accused of committing sexual harassment. Furthermore, it appears that the company paid Singhal an amount of money for his acts.

Four years ago, there was an allegation that he groped one of his female employees while he was drunk during a party at the office. After some subsequent investigations were carried out internally in the company, Singhal finally decided to resign himself to leaving the company. Still, it seems like he did not just simply leave Google. They made a deal involving him leaving this company as well as keeping the whole incident quiet, and in return, Google had to pay him a total of 45 million dollars as an exit package.

Should it appear that you have already heard about something similar to this recently, then you indeed did.

Amit Singhal

The year was 2017, more particularly November, when The Information unveiled complaints that were previously hushed. These complaints involve Andy Rubin - the Android creator. During many of his years working at the company, Rubin was alleged of several sexual misconducts, which even include coercing one of the employees to offer him oral sex right in a hotel room. Following that incident, an investigation was conducted. That resulted in his being forced to leave the company in 2014. However, along with his resignation is Google’s agreement to give him a huge load of money (90 million dollars precisely). He received his last installment for this incident from Google in 2018.

When the news became widely known, Google’s Chief Executive Officer - Sundar Pichai along with Eileen Naughton - Google’s Vice President of people operations, declared their sorrow towards this incident, stating that it is somewhat difficult to understand. Google has since released several platitudes in memos to its employees, ensuring that it will make some changes alongside stricter guidelines so as to protect the female employees. As for their part, Google’s employees wanted to make sure that their employer understands they were absolutely serious about this. They decided to walk out of Google offices all around the globe in protest.

Amit Singhal

Therefore, it's mostly considered as clichéd right now hearing that Google had done the very same thing many times. At least, if the company’s management was truly sincere about apologizing to their female employees, they would certainly have volunteered the information regarding Singhal’s incident in the first place.

The court complaint which uncovered the latest bit of news was actually filed in Santa Clara county by the shareholder of Google - James Martin last October. Then, they confirmed the reports by the famous magazine - New York Times. In the complaint, he implicated Google in keeping its custom of defending its loose-handed executives. It is willing to go as far as they need to protect those executives and its reputation, even stating that Singhal left the company in order to concentrate on his philanthropic activities.

Sundar Pichai

However, there is still a much worse point that we need to take into consideration here. At the time Andy Rubin was forced to leave in 2014 with a considerable amount of sexual harassment allegation alongside a sackful of money, the Chief Executive Officer of Google at that time was Larry Page. Alphabet, an umbrella company of Google, was only established one year later (which was 2015). When the umbrella company was in business, Page took over the leadership of Alphabet, which certainly made Sundar Pichai the Chief Executive Officer of Google.

Which means, though Pichai had the right to claim helplessness or even ignorance when it comes to Andy Rubin and his treatment, he doesn’t have any excuses about Amit Singhal’s incident. He became the CEO on 24th of October 2015 while Amit Singhal resigned from Google on 26th of February 2016.