Khaitan & Co advised Bahrain-headquartered telecom service provider Bahrain Telecommunications Company (Batelco) in its $174m stake sale in its Indian joint venture STel to Skycity Foundation, which was advised by Rajani Associates.

Khaitan & Co partner Murali Neelakantan acted for Batelco on all issues under Indian and English law, stated a press release from Khaitan & Co, which included structuring the deal and drafting the share purchase agreement and other transactional documents.

Skycity, which bought Batelco’s Mauritian subsidiary-held stake in its joint venture with Siva Group, was advised by Rajani & Associates founding partner Prem Rajani.

STel claimed Batelco was reacting to the Supreme Court’s (SC) cancellation of its 2G telecom licenses, the ET reported on Thursday (9 February).

STel reportedly said that the Bahrain company was “very uneasy” in the Indian telecoms sector, which had become a “badly-planned hurdle race” for new telecom operators.

On 2 February the SC cancelled all mobile-telecom-service licenses issued without auction after January 2008, raising uncertainty over investments made in India by international telecoms operators, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.

Photo by Gabriel