| Piramal Group
Piramal Group
The Piramal Group, led by Ajay Piramal, is one of India’s foremost business conglomerates with a global footprint. The group has a diversified business portfolio in the pharmaceuticals, financial services, real estate development, healthcare insight and analytics, premium glass packaging and the joint venture distressed assets investment platform. Considering the diverse business of the group, the legal department is structured in such a way that each business gets dedicated legal support and, at the same time, the oversight and control of the legal function is maintained independently. Functionally, the legal team reports to the group general counsel and on the day-to-day business affairs the team works closely with the management and key managerial personnel of the relevant business, which they support. This approach within the group is popularly known as “partnership approach”, which focuses on supporting the businesses, but at all times maintaining the legal function’s independence in functioning. Key individuals of the group legal team and their positions are: group general counsel, S. K. Honnesh; head of legal for Global Pharma, Ahmad T. Aboelezz; president legal of Piramal Capital and Housing Finance Anand Vardhan; vice president legal for Piramal Realty, Shahzeb Hussain Sayyed; executive vice president and general counsel of Decision Resources Group, Michael Weiss; senior legal counsel Seema Akhelikar; general counsel of IndiaRF, Mrinal Chandran; and general manager for corporate legal, Monisha Chadha.
Some recent transactions include: a MoU with Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to co-sponsor a renewable energy focused InvIT with a targeted initial corpus of US$600m; a fund raise by PEL of INR 7,000 crore through a qualified institutional placement and rights issue. Recent achievements of the Piramal legal team in litigations include: the Securities Appellate Tribunal ruling dropping insider trading charges against PEL and its promoters; the Supreme Court ruling in favour of Saridon exempting it from the list of banned fixed dose combinations; and the US district court ruling in a patent infringement matter declaring one of the company’s pharma generic products as non-infringing.
The businesses that Piramal is involved in witness constant regulatory changes and instructions from sector regulators which keeps the legal team on its toes. The recent Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code is an important regulatory change for the group’s financial services business. The Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 which is a fairly stringent regulation for real estate developers imposes a high degree of compliance but, at the same time, has brought in transparency in the system and has been a key regulatory change for the real estate business. Both these legislations have had a significant impact on the business Piramal does in financial services and real estate development. In addition to regular notifications on various aspects by the applicable regulatory authorities, both these legislations are frequently reviewed, interpreted and applied by judiciary at various levels. It is the key effort of the legal team to track these, review the impact and take necessary action going forward.
The Piramal Group has commenced the new financial year with strong performance across its businesses and the focus will continue to be on delivering robust growth. It is the effort of the group, as indicated in public announcements, to tie up appropriate equity and debt to ensure that the group is well positioned to weather any difficulties in the market. It is the legal team’s endeavour to support the group with right legal guidance and advise to achieve this goal. In addition to handling day-to-day legal matters to ensure that businesses are run in a compliant manner and provide legal support for business transactions, the legal team also actively partners with the business to analyse new/proposed sectoral regulatory changes to understand how it impacts the businesses and the changes that may need to be made for the businesses to continue to be legally compliant. Also, if there is a grey area in law or if a policy change is required, Piramal being a key market player in the sectors in which it has a presence, the legal team also actively engages with the regulators including through relevant industry forums to address such issues.
Technology is an integral part of the group as it remains aligned to its IT vision: “Aspire to be a strategic partner through innovative solutions for rapid growth enablement”. The legal team is working on evaluating and implementing technology solutions to centrally monitor regulatory compliances. The legal team also recently collaborated with the IT team at Piramal and external consultants to implement a data privacy compliance framework for the group. The legal team in engaging and discussing with various partners to harness technology to improve output. Some of the businesses like financial services and distressed assets platform are new and are at a nascent stage and this gives us the opportunity to adopt the right (and tested) technology for the department.
The Piramal legal team’s key motto is ‘No compromise with compliance’ and “Partnership Approach” to drive growth of the group. The Piramal Group’s values of “knowledge, action and care” are the benchmark for the legal team. The legal team pro-actively analyses new and proposed regulatory changes and discusses with the business for any changes that are required to be made from a business strategy or compliance perspective. The legal team sees itself as a business-enabler, aligning itself with the key goals of the business teams and pro-actively partners with the business teams in the decision making process right from inception to ensure that any risks are identified early on so that mitigating measures can be taken, coming up with innovation solutions for any legal challenges faced by the business and generally ensuring that all business transactions are legally compliant. The legal team also provides legal support for the group’s diverse philanthropic activities undertaken by Piramal Foundation and its associated ventures.