BlackRock whistleblower sues over firing, shutdown of China monitoring tool

By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - BlackRock 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.

Azhar said he began developing Trend Spotter in March 2021 as a "hackathon" project, and that it received "widespread attention and acclaim" within BlackRock.

The New York-based company ended March with $10.5 trillion of assets under management.

A BlackRock spokesman called Azhar's accusations "completely meritless," and said Azhar was let go for poor performance and unprofessional conduct.

"Trend Spotter's sole purpose was to summarize client interactions for marketing opportunities," the spokesman said. "It did not monitor investments and had no compliance capabilities."

Azhar's lawyer, Subhan Tariq, rejected BlackRock's response. He said that, before being fired, Azhar had been preparing to become head of strategy at BlackRock AI Labs, "underscoring his value to the company."

Last summer, the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party began seeking information on whether BlackRock and index provider MSCI facilitated investments into blacklisted Chinese companies.

In April, the committee found that Wall Street, through index fund investments, channeled $6.5 billion in 2023 into 63 Chinese companies flagged by the U.S. government for supporting China's military or human rights abuses.

The committee called the activity "not illegal," and urged Congress to pass laws restricting such investments. BlackRock and MSCI have said they complied 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 court in Manhattan seeks $10 million each in compensatory damages and punitive damages for violating state labor law.

Perkins-Munn and Hakkim are also defendants and, according to the complaint, now work respectively at JPMorgan Chase and Fidelity Investments. Neither company immediately responded to requests for comment.

The case is Azhar v BlackRock Inc et al, New York State Supreme Court, New York County.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Jonathan Oatis)