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Alibaba, Jack Ma Summoned by the Indian Court on Former Employee Allegation
An Indian court summoned Alibaba and its chairman Jack Ma in a lawsuit in which a former employee in India alleged that he had been wrongfully dismissed after objecting to what he saw as propaganda and misleading news about company software, documents that Reuters had received.
The case comes weeks after India cited security issues in blocking Alibaba's UC News, UC Browser and 57 other Chinese applications after a dispute between the two countries' border powers.
After the ban that China opposed, India requested written responses from all the firms involved, including whether they blocked material or operated on behalf of any foreign government.
In legal filings dated 20 July and previously unreported, Alibaba 's former UCWeb employee, Pushpandra Singh Parmar, alleges that the corporation used to suppress material perceived as harmful to China, and its UC Browser and UC News applications published fake news to trigger social and political chaos.
Civil Judge Sonia Sheokand of a district court in Gurugram, a satellite city of India's capital, New Delhi, gave summonses to Alibaba, Jack Ma and around a dozen persons or business groups, ordering them to appear in court or via a lawyer on July 29, court records revealed.
The judge has ordered written statements from the company and its management within 30 days, according to the summons.
UC India claimed in its declaration that it was "unwavering in its commitment to the Indian market and the wellbeing of its local workers, and its policies are compliant with local legislation. We are unable to comment on pending litigation.
The members of Alibaba did not respond to requests for comments from the Chinese corporation or on behalf of Jack Ma.
Parmar, who served as an associate director at the UC Web office in Gurugram until October 2017 and is claiming $268,000 (roughly Rs. 2 crores) in damages, referred Reuters' questions to his counsel, Atul Ahlawat, who refused to say that the case was a sub-judgment.
The court case is the new challenge for Alibaba in India since the Indian Government's ban on devices, following which UC Web has begun to lay off some of its employees in India.
Until the apps were blocked, the UC Browser had been downloaded at least 689 million times in India, while UC News had 79.8 million downloads, most of which were downloaded in 2017 and 2018 by the analytics company Sensor Tower.
