The planned acquisition of Snapdeal by the E commerce giant Flipkart, has hit a roadblock that might jeopardize the entire deal. Wipro CEO Azim Premji’s personal equity fund PremjiInvest has reportedly objected to the payouts that are being offered by Flipkart to the stakeholders, as part of the deal.
Bloomberg reported PremjiInvest, which is one of the smaller investors of Snapdeal has written to the board objecting to the special payouts for the founders and two larger investors Kalaari Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. As a precondition of the transaction, Flipkart told Snapdeal all the investors of the startup had to agree to the terms of the deal. This objection by PremjiInvest will halt the biggest E commerce merger set to compete against Amazon.com Inc.
According to the present transaction deals, larger investors and founders will receive a better bargain for their investment. The co founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal will together receive $30 million, while early investors Kalaari Capital and Nexus Venture will get $60 million in addition to new equity in Flipkart. This nonbinding preliminary agreement was proposed at a fraction ($1 billion) of Snapdeal’s peak valuation ($6.5 billion).
PremjiInvest is mainly objecting to the differential payment of $90 million that will be handed to a select group of early shareholders and founders. It has no objection to the proposed $30 million that will be given to Snapdeal employees.
The largest shareholder of Snapdeal, SoftBank Group Corp ., has pushed for the deal as the ecommerce company lost market share to Amazon and struggled to raise funding last year. Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, BlackRock, Temasek and the family of Ratan Tata are the other smaller investors of the startup.