From a legal standpoint, an employee's status as a founder or owner/shareholder is largely irrelevant. There's no basis for special treatment--in fact, dependin

From a legal standpoint, an employee's status as a founder or owner/shareholder is largely irrelevant. There's no basis for special treatment--in fact, depending on how it's handled, such special treatment would, at a minimum, place the company in a potentially perilous legal situation with future cases. One of the major ideas behind suspending employees for investigations is to eliminate their ability to influence the investigation. Also, it's a immediate precautionary measure to prevent the behavior from continuing should the complaint be found to be valid. In that sense, it protects the employer by keeping them at a distance in the short-term. They can also point to it in the press and in future legal proceedings (if any) as part of a strategy of showing that they took the complaint seriously from the beginning.