A former employee has filed a lawsuit against Snapchat company Snap Inc, alleging that he was wrongfully terminated as a result of refusing to partake in the company’s false representations of metrics in an effort to inflate its initial public offering (IPO) value.
While most of former Snapchat employee Anthony Pompliano’s lawsuit, filed on January 4 in the Superior Court in Los Angeles, has been redacted, it accuses Snapchat’s executives of inflating Snapchat’s valuation through false representations, “with the ultimate goal of taking the company public through a multi-billion dollar initial public offering”.
“Snapchat will not let anything stand in its way of an IPO, including its obligations to represent material facts accurately,” the lawsuit claims.
According to the lawsuit, Pompliano’s “refusal to participate” in the misrepresentations caused his unlawful termination from the company, which he was led to join in the first place after “Snapchat fraudulently induced” and “aggressively recruited” him away from his job at Facebook by again misrepresenting two metrics that have been redacted from the lawsuit.
Working at Snapchat for just three weeks, Pompliano was responsible for running user growth and engagement, an area of the business previously neglected by Snapchat. Pompliano claimed that when he discovered the misrepresentations and alerted vice president of Finance Drew Boller, vice president of Communications Jill…