Snap Unseals Lawsuit From Former Employee

Snap, the maker of a disappearing messaging app, has unsealed a lawsuit from a former employee who contended in a lawsuit in January that Snap inflated its user base and alleged that Snap tried to get him to break agreements he made with Facebook.

According to a report in The Financial Times, the employee had asked a judge to unseal the lawsuit, but before a judge could rule on that request, Snap did just that. Snap is dismissing the charges lodged by Anthony Pompliano, who worked at Snap for three weeks, saying it was a “publicity stunt” and that he was fired for poor performance, reported the FT.

“The simple fact is that he knows exactly nothing about Snap’s current metrics. He and his lawyers are — not to put too fine a point on matters — just making things up,” Snap’s lawyers said in a new filing covered by the FT. “That is why Snap has nothing to hide, especially now that it is a public company.”

According to Pompliano’s complaint, Snap had been providing false numbers about performance, including user growth and engagement to investors ahead of its initial public offering. What’s more, Pompliano said that when Snap was trying to lure him from Facebook, Snap’s chief strategy officer, Imran Khan, told him the company is seeing double-digit month-over-month growth in the number of users and had already hit 100 million daily active users. Pompliano said he quickly realized both metrics weren’t true and was told by Chief Executive Evan Spiegel that it’s “no big deal,” the lawsuit claims.

Lawyers for Pompliano wrote in the filing, according to the FT: “Snapchat’s leadership saw Mr. Pompliano as an impediment to their planned IPO because he refused to turn a blind eye to Snapchat’s misrepresentations. Indeed, Snapchat accurately perceived that Mr. Pompliano would ‘blow the whistle.’”

The former Snap employee also said he was hired in part to glean information about Facebook, with Pompliano alleging Khan asked him to draw a chart of which employees Snap should try to steal from Facebook, which would have violated his agreement with Facebook.