Dhananjay Shahi, former senior vice president legal at Religare Enterprises, has joined Baring Private Equity Asia’s newly set up lending arm as head of legal and executive vice president.

Baring PE Asia has recently started a lending vertical, dubbed BPEA India Credit, by poaching “almost all the team members” of Religare Enterprises subsidiary Religare Credit Advisors, VCCircle (paywall) had reported last week.

The Delhi University graduate, with a 2002 LLM from the University of San Diego School of Law, began his career at Kanth & Associates in 2003, joined Trilegal in 2006 for two-and-a-half years, beofre moving in-house.

From 2008 to 2010 he worked at InterGlobe Technologies as a senior legal counsel, and then moved to Religare Enterprises, where he became senior vice president-legal before leaving for Barings.

In September Baring PE Asia had promoted deputy general counsel Kirti Ram Hariharan to general counsel transactions.