Khaitan & Co has bagged the mandate to advise Omidyar Network’s investment in Indian start-up news and commentary website Scroll.in, according to a press release from the firm.
Omidyar, which is founded by eBay billionaire founder Pierre Omidyar, was advised by Bangalore partner Ganesh Prasad with Mumbai direct tax executive director Daksha Baxi. Fenwick & West Mountain View-based partner Steven Levine and associate Amit Khanna acted for Omidyar on US laws.
Kartik Mahalingam, former Amarchand Mangaldas Hyderabad partner and current Omidyar India legal head, was heading up the Indian leg of the deal in-house.
The investment was made into Scroll India’s US-based parent, Scroll Media Inc. The deal value has not been disclosed.
Scroll was launched less than a year ago and has inked a contract recently with US business blog Quartz (QZ) to launch an India edition.
Correction: The original version of this story did not mention Fenwick as one of the legal advisers. This has now been added and corrected.
Comments
To clarify, Khaitan did the due diligence and structuring.
Fenwick is the go to US counsel for Omidyar that does all its US investment agreements (probably for compliance issues as in most funds), but that all went through the in house team without Khaitan having been involved or presumably aware.
For a deal we ask at least one side on whether there were any other law firms involved and sometimes we miss one.
In this case, the news is interesting enough anyway, since our main priority are Indian law firms and the mandates they win, and also since the investment had not been reported in the press yet.
The error is of course regretted though these kind are also sometimes hard to avoid.