Former Vodafone senior vice president legal Nitin Banerjee has joined Indian energy major Cairn Oil & Gas to replace Vidyut Gulati as its group general counsel (GC), as first reported by PTI.

As a member of the Vedanta vertical’s business executive committee he will drive the company’s vision to make half of India's crude oil and gas, according to a statement from Vedanta. He will be based in Mumbai.

As GC, he will also be heading Cairn's legal team of nine, which handles legal and compliance for Vedanta Cairn Oil and Gas, and is part of the Vedanta Group Legal Council to drive the Vedanta Group's legal agenda.

A Lucknow University 2001 law alumnus, Banerjee's last held law firm role was as partner at J Sagar Associates (JSA), as we had reported in 2012. He had joined JSA after having been head of legal at the BG Group and returning as vice president legal at the same company.

After JSA, he was senior vice president at Vodafone since April 2016. We have reached out to him for comment.

Former Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas (SAM) partner Vidyut Gulati, who had joined Cairn as its GC in December 2015 left the company in July 2017, as reported first by VC Circle, to join Bharti Airtel as its director legal, reporting to Bharti Enterprises group GC Mukesh Bhavnani.

Cairn is already India's biggest private producer of crude oil, was the fastest growing energy company in the world for 2012 and 2013 and has a basin production potential of 300,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, thus managing to contribute $3bn to the exchequer during the 2014-15 financial year by reducing India's dependence on oil imports by over $6bn that year, according to its website.