Pitango VC partner suspends himself amid harassment claims
Rami Beracha, a Managing General Partner at venture capital firm Pitango, has temporarily suspended himself from the fund following an exposé by the Uvda (fact) television program broadcast Wednesday night, which presented testimony on acts of sexual harassment that he had allegedly committed.
Beracha continues to deny that he forced himself on women, but he has suspended himself from the fund, and Pitango said in a statement that he was taking a break in order to clear his name.
According to the program, Beracha hired a firm of private investigators to follow women he had harassed, most of them technology entrepreneurs who tried to raise money from Pitango, which was founded in 1993 by Chemi Peres and Rami Kalish. Journalists and an entrepreneur who had received information about Beracha’s alleged conduct were also kept under surveillance.
One woman entrepreneur related how after a successful initial meeting, a further meeting was arranged for her with Beracha at a restaurant in north Tel Aviv. “It sounded odd to me, but I said: ‘Go for it, you can’t say no.” She said the first hour of the meeting consisted of a professional conversation, until Beracha started to talk about how he was wounded in the First Lebanon War, leading to the amputation of an arm and a leg.
“While he told his story, he put his hand on my leg. It wasn’t a gesture of ‘I want to tell you something.’ I didn’t know what to do, and after a few seconds I changed position. I couldn’t remove his hand, and then it happened again, and again I changed position. And then I think he put his hand on my back. His hand was touching me. I didn’t manage to say to myself, ‘get out of here’. It took me time to absorb the situation – I came to close a deal, I didn’t hear the background noise.”
Beracha then kissed the woman, and at that point she managed to push him away and leave the restaurant. “He said, ‘Don’t be heavy, what are you making a scene about?’” she said.
According to Uvda presenter Ilana Dayan, several other women described a similar pattern of behavior: a meeting that starts on a professional basis and turns into harassment. Beracha later hired a private investigation company, Yaad Investigations, to track tech entrepreneur Shahar Kaminitz, who had received testimony from women alleging they had been harassed by Beracha. According to the program, the company gave Beracha sensitive information about Kaminitz.
He then asked the company to monitor journalists Inbal Orpaz, Hadas Steiff and Sharon Shporer, fearing that they would obtain information about his behavior.
Beracha stated in response to the program: “For months, I have been subject to a campaign of smears and persecution [being waged by] someone in the tech industry who, for motives unknown to me, decided to ruin my good name and harm my family and my livelihood to the point of complete destruction.
He added that: “When I finally understood that someone had set their sights on ‘taking me down’ and would stop at nothing to do so, I decided it was my right and even my obligation to my family to find out who I was dealing with, and so I approached investigations company BICI... my only instruction to them was to monitor the social networks.
“I have also decided to freeze all my activity at Pitango, to take time away from work to deal with the campaign against me, with the aim of clearing my name.”
(Globes/TNS)