Flipkart

Karthik Mahalingam, who in 2018 had left partnership at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas (SAM) in Bangalore for a one-year MBA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has returned to India to head up Walmart-owned online shop Flipkart as head of corporate governance, according to Linked-in.

Thomson Reuters general counsel for global emerging markets, Bijoya Roy, has taken up the position to head Flipkart in Bangalore under its new Walmart owners.

Flipkart group general counsel (GC) Rajinder Sharma has left the company after less than a year there

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.”

Flipkart has hired Samsung’s former director and general counsel South and West Asia, Rajinder Sharma, as its group general counsel, while the company has been busy restructuring its operations with its recent buy-back of its logistics operations from WS Retail Services Pvt Ltd as reported by Mint on Tuesday (22 September).