In 2019 there was a deal formed between Amazon and Future groups where Amazon made an investment of 49% of stake in Future groups and in return stated that the latter cannot sell their assets to any company in the competition.
Reliance industries who are one of the leading retail business expanded their line of business into e-commerce and are now looking up to investing in Future groups the agglomerate Indian company who are into the same line of business. This deal was ratified by the Competition Commission of India (CCI), Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and National Stock Exchange (NSE). But according to the deal, Future’s have breached the contract with Amazon so the latter had filed the case against Future groups in Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC) which has passed a temporary measure to hold back the deal in favour of Amazon and is to give the final adjudication for the case.
Founder and CEO of Future Group have appealed in Delhi High Court against the temporary measure passed by SIAC and the High Court has decided that the present state of affairs of the case will be maintained. It has stated that they cannot stop Amazon from requesting the legal body to object to the deal between the Indian companies but also states that the deal between them are in terms of the Indian Law. It gives a notifiable judgement that Amazon cannot interfere in the deals made by the holding company as they don’t have any such authority given by the Government as in respect of Foreign Direct Investment made by them.
Kishore Biyani has made statements in the court which states that the Future Group had been hit hard during the pandemic and were collapsing financially and Amazon took no initiative for the betterment of the holding company and to get to the better situation they had to look for a venture capitalist and Reliance Industries was the knight in the shining armour.
Amazon is making all the efforts for not keeping Reliance Industries in the advantage of this deal and the protagonist of Future group says that if they miss this deal with Reliance industries they will collapse to an extreme end of jeopardizing thousands of lives of the employees of the company.
After Amazon stood before the Supreme Court for the situation in their favour, the Supreme Court passed an order that the special tribunal can get going with the case but cannot pass the final verdict for the above case.
