Zoho co-founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu on Tuesday said he never transferred his shares in the company to anyone else while pointing out that it is complete fiction that he abandoned his estranged wife and son. Vembu took to Twitter after Forbes reported that he has divested a chunk of his shares in the company in favour of his sister and her husband without informing his wife. “I never ever transferred my shares in the company to anyone else. I lived in the US for the first 24 years of our 27-year history and much of what constitutes the company was built in India. That is reflected in the ownership, ” he said.
While a divorce proceeding is on between Vembu and his wife Pramila Srinivasan, both were living in California (US) for nearly 25 years with their child who is autistic. Vembu, who moved back to Tamil Nadu in early 2020, had filed for divorce in California in August 2021.
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Responding to vicious personal attacks and slander on his character, Vembu said his personal life has been a tragedy unlike his business life as ‘autism destroyed our lives and left me suicidally depressed’. He was appointed to the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) in February 2021.
He said he and his wife were in the fight against autism for over 15 years, adding that “she is a super mom and her passionate cause is curing our son of autism.”
“I worked hard along with her. To ensure his safety, I also took some of his treatments so I could know what they did to him. As our son got older (24 today), I felt the endless treatments he was under were not helping much and he would be better off in rural India, closer to loving people and helping to lift up people. She felt I was giving up. Our marriage collapsed under that stress,” his said.
Unfortunately, he wrote, ‘the end of our marriage brought a new conflict’.
“She is making unfounded allegations in court about my ownership interest in Zoho and she has chosen to go to the press too. The matter is in court in the US, my filings are public,” he stated.
Calling the charges that he abandoned his wife and son a “fiction”, he said “they enjoy a far richer life than I do and I have supported them fully”.
He said his US salary for the last three years has been with his wife and that he gave his house also to her besides Zoho supporting her foundation.
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“All of this mess was caused by my uncle Ram (my father’s younger brother) living in the US, who I gave shelter to due to his terminal cancer, taking out his own long running frustrations with my father. He is doing that by spreading malicious rumours about me and my siblings. My uncle Ram from Alaska was estranged from my father and us for decades, and we had little or no communication until I invited him to live with us in California a few years ago, purely on compassionate grounds due to his terminal cancer and his lack of family to care for him,” Vembu said.