Law firms

Kanth & Associates added former HDFC Bank and Bank of Fujairah vice president Arvind Garg as a partner to build its banking and finance vertical.

IndusLaw added Ray Vikram Nath – a registered foreign attorney in Japan – to build its Japan practice. Nath joins Indus Delhi as a senior associate.

Verus has added independent legal consultant Roochi Tripathy as a partner in Mumbai to focus solely on advising emerging businesses.

AZB & Partners advised Singapore based infrastructure company Cube Highways & Infrastructure on its Rs 248 crores ($37.4m) buy of Madhucon Agra Jaipur Expressways (MAJEL) which was advised by Nishith Desai Associates (NDA).

AZB partner Yashwant Mathur, senior associates Esha Pruthi and Ambarish Mohanty and associates Shridha Malhotra, Devanshu Sajlan and Nitin Saluja acted for Cube.

NDA partner Rajesh Simhan advised MAJEL

Cube would operate the 57 kilometers stretch of National Highway 11, connecting the cities of Mahua and Bharatpur, on build operate transfer (BOT) basis connecting tourist corridors of Agra and Jaipur. MAJEL started operating in 2009.

International Finance Corp (IFC), a part of the World Bank group, had picked up a 20 per cent stake in Cube which is promoted by I Squared Capital. IFC had committed a $100m (Rs 6640 crore) investment in Cube, which will primarily acquire operating road assets in India, reported Mint.

AZB & Partners advised former Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin and his family on their acquisition of a minority stake in ANI Technologies which runs taxi app Ola. Ola was advised by IndusLaw.

AZB Delhi partner Anil Kasturin and senior associate Jaishree Tolani acted for Sarin who, as Mint reported, is joining Ola as an independent director.

Indus declined to comment but it is understood that Noida partner Gaurav Dani led the deal for Ola.

Founded in January 2011 by two IIT Bombay alumni, Ola currently plies over 20,000 vehicles in over 100 Indian cities, is backed by investors such as DST Global, GIC, Falcon Edge Capital, SoftBank Group Corp., Tiger Global Management LLC, Steadview Capital and Accel Partners, acquired rival TaxiForSure this year in a deal worth $200m, and is being investigated for predatory pricing allegations in the Competition Commission of India, even as the Delhi high court imposed a ban on it.

Khaitan & Co advised Indian stationery maker Writefine Products on selling 32.5 per cent equity to Italian art products maker and distributor Fabbrica Italiana Lapis ed Affini (FILA). FILA was advised by AZB & Partners and Italian law firm Studio Legale Salonia Associati.

Khaitan associate partner Mehul Shah, senior associate Vivek Sriram,and associate Vidur Sinha acted for Writefine Products.

AZB Partner Alka Nalavadi acted for FILA which was increasing its shareholding in Writefine to 51 per cent from 18.5 percent.

Writefine Products, a Gujarat-based company that claims to have close to 3,000 employees, was valued at around Rs 740 crore (around $114m) in the deal, reported VCC Circle.

Khaitan & Co acted for Reliance Telecommunications in its acquisition of the wireless business of J Sagar Associates (JSA)-advised Sistema Shyam Teleservices for Rs 2,100 crore of equity, while also taking on Rs 2,400 crore of Sistema’s debt to the government.

Delhi based lawyer Abhay Vohra, who went independent from big law firms a year ago, advised CL Educate on acquiring 51 percent stake in education consulting company Accendre Knowledge Management, which was advised by its in-house legal team.

Like rival foreign-funded e-commerce player Flipkart, aggressive foreign entrant Amazon too has built up a complex structure skirting India’s restrictions on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the online retail space, by dividing its operations and investments between the customer-facing web front-end and a purportedly arms-length dominant supplier of the actual goods, reported Livemint:

Cloudtail India Pvt. Ltd, a joint venture between Amazon.com Inc. and NR Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures, has become the biggest seller or merchant on Amazon India’s platform, underlining how the world’s largest online retailer has used loopholes in the law to deploy a mix of the marketplace and the direct-selling business model in India.

Editor R Sukumar argued in a column in Mint on Sunday today: “Companies and their investors will probably explain their actions as being driven by India’s restrictive laws. And perhaps the government thinks so too. What else can explain its reluctance to act on such obvious and flagrant violation of the law. In the business domain, such behaviour, instead of being condemned, is actually admired.”

Khaitan & Co advised rail freight car makers, the Australia-based UGL Rail Services and the Indian Texmaco Rail and Engineering on UGL’s sale of its 50 per cent stake in its joint venture with Texmaco – Texmaco United Group Rail.

Khaitan Kolkata partner Padam Khaitan, associate partner Arindam Sarkar and associates Shourya Sengupta and Prithwijit Gangopadhyay acted for UGL

Khaitan Mumbai partner Haigreve Khaitan, associate partner Anuj Sah and Associate Sunayana Bose acted for Texmaco.

UGL sold its share in the Indian joint venture because it was starved of orders after the downturn in locomotive sales in Australia, and it was set up for primarily catering to the Australian market, reported the PTI.

Delhi firm Seth Dua & Associates hired former Khaitan & Co senior associate Gaurav Dhwaj in telecoms, media and technology (TMT) and Vaish Associates senior associate Upvan Gupta in tax as associate partners.£££para£££

No “fresh permission or renewal of permission” shall be granted by the RBI to foreign law firms seeking to open a liaison office in India “till the policy is reviewed based on final disposal of the matter by the Supreme Court”, the _Reserve Bank of India (RBI) _said yesterday in a notification reported by the PTI.

This was possibly issued to comply with the Supreme Court orders in the AK Balaji case, most recently in September, directing the RBI to maintain the status quo, or there is an outside chance the notification was prompted by a foreign law firm inquiring about the status of the policy.

The [https://www.legallyindia.com/News/download-the-judgement-lawyers-collective-v-ashurst-chadbourne-parke-white-a-case Bombay high court had first artculated the ban in 2009 against Ashurst, White & Case and Chadbourne & Parke that had representative or liaison offices in India.

Dhir & Dhir Associates has launched its third national office, setting up in Hyderabad on 28 October.

BMR Legal announced the induction of Kaushik Mukherjee, who was earlier a partner at J Sagar & Associates as the second partner based out of the firm’s Mumbai office.

Mega deal sees five law firms bring investment home.

J Sagar Associates (JSA) retained partner Chitra Narayan in Chennai will go independent to focus on mediation, reported Bar & Bench.

She told the website, “I have been a mediator with the Tamil Nadu Media & Conciliation Centre for about ten years and a year and a half ago I along with others co-founded Private Initiative for Mediation and I want to focus on that now”, while JSA’s outgoing managing partner Berjis Desai said that “she was keen to pursue a career in mediation principally. Sad to lose an excellent resource”.

Narayan had joined JSA when the firm absorbed local start-up Vichar last year to open in Chennai. Vichar’s other co-founders Vinod Kumar and Aarthi Sivanand remain at JSA