At Cars45, the exit of the CEO, Co-founder and 9 other senior management employees is raising questions.
On September 1, 2020, Cars45, the platform that is trying to organise the used car market across Africa put up an Instagram post. The post, which has now been deleted, was a notice to the “general public” about some individuals.
Cars45 went on to say in the Instagram post that the people in the picture it posted are no longer with the company.
“They are not authorised to represent the company in any matter whatsoever. Anyone dealing with them on behalf of Cars45 is doing so at his own responsibility.”
It was a strange way of announcing some major exits. Some of the people in the picture are Iyamu Mohammed, the co-founder of Cars45 and Timitope Oluguonye, the company’s former Director of Corporate Services. Mayokun Fadebiyi was also the VP Commercial for the company.
One person whose picture did not appear in the Instagram post is Etop Ikpe, although his LinkedIn profile confirms that he left his position at the company in July 2020. While Etop’s exit appeared to be handled better, the recent exits suggest that something is afoot at Cars45.
Cars45 says employees left on their own accord
Despite the dramatic way it decided to talk about employees leaving, Cars45 says their public notice was standard practice.
WeeTracker quotes the company as saying, “the employees left on their own accord and we deemed it fit to inform our customers because we value transparency.”
“It was simply our responsibility to let our customers know this change as they have been known with the business and without any communication from us, customers might still approach them for business regarding Cars45. Hence, we thought it best to let our customers know they are no longer representing Cars45 and the business as a whole.”
A look at the LinkedIn pages of some of the employees who left the business shows that they’re now at NewCo, a company with little online presence.
Mum’s the word at NewCo
TechCabal reached out to some of the former employees for comments, but they did not respond at the time of this report. Etop Ikpe is now listed as the CEO of NewCo, Mayokun Fadebiyi, its VP Commercial, Iyamu Mohammed is VP, New Market, Timitope Oluguonye is the COO while John Egwu is VP, Operations.
Beyond these LinkedIn updates, the details of the new company are unclear. TechCabal also reached out to the Endeavour network, an organization which Etop Ikpe belongs to. Endeavour says they will not comment on the matter at this time.
While it is clear that there’s a new management running Cars45, it remains unknown why they chose to handle exits this way.
*This is a developing story
