Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas and Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas provide local legal advice on LIC’s $2.7 billion listing
Linklaters and Duane Morris have partnered with two leading local firms to advise Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) on its $2.7 billion IPO, India’s largest IPO ever.
Linklaters and Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas (SAM) advised the lead managers on the transaction, while Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas (CAM) and Duane Morris joined to advise LIC.
The listing beat the previous record set by mobile payments and financial services company Paytm, which went public last year with a $2.4 billion offering.
The Magic Circle UK team included capital markets partner Amit Singh, counsel Joseph Wolpin and managing associate Anadee Banerji.
Based in Singapore, Singh leads the firm’s capital markets practice in South and Southeast Asia. His team worked side-by-side with CAM’s group, which included Prashant Gupta, head of the national capital markets practice, as well as partner Sayantan Dutta and associates Ruth Chenchiah, Shweta Agarwal, Rudresh Mandal and Sridutt Mishra.
Singh said, “We are honored to have had the opportunity to work on India’s largest IPO of all time. This is not only a landmark transaction in the insurance industry, but also in the further development of the Indian equity markets.”
Advice on LIC’s market debut means SAM has advised on all three of India’s largest IPOs – working on the listing of Paytm last year and working on the IPO of state-owned mining and refining company Coal India in 2010.
Government-appointed investment banks chosen to manage the listing included Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Nomura and Bank of America Securities, as well as domestic players JM Financial, SBI Capital Markets, Kotak Mahindra Capital, ICICI Securities and Axis Capital.
According to Asian Legal Business, the CAM team included partners Yash Ashar, Gokul Rajan, Devaki Mankad, Indranath Bishnu, Amita Gupta Katragadda, Indranil Deshmukh, Gathi Prakash, Jyoti Dastidar, Preksha Malik and SR Patnaik.
Duane Morris’ group was led by Jamie Benson, partner and head of Singapore’s capital markets practice, and included Philadelphia-based partner Hope Krebs and Singapore-based associates Lucia Orozco and Yeo Ming Ze.
The Philadelphia law firm has worked in connection with four IPOs in India since 2017.
LIC, a state-owned insurance group and investment company, is by far the largest Indian insurer, holding two-thirds of the total market share with assets worth over USD 450 billion.
It raised $2.7 billion at the IPO and closed with a market value of around $71.54 billion for a share price of 875.25 rupees compared to the IPO price of 949 rupees, Reuters reported.
Initially touted as the “listing of the decade,” LIC’s IPO struggled to garner initial interest from law firms, due in part to comparatively low government mandate fees and the sheer complexity of the entire endeavor.
That prompted the government to sweeten the deal.
The LIC’s huge investment portfolio, complex business structure and product range would make it a “nightmare for lawyers to draft the prospectus,” said Nitin Potdar, an M&A partner at Indian law firm J. Sagar Associates, in September.
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