Last verified: 22 June 2026
A law student can read a textbook on mergers and acquisitions and still not understand how a deal actually moves. The textbook tells you what an open offer is. It does not tell you what it feels like when a foreign bank pumps three billion dollars into an Indian lender, or when two billionaires fight over the carcass of a bankrupt cement-and-construction empire, and the loser appeals all the way to the appellate tribunal. Deals are where the doctrine you memorise turns into money, leverage, and litigation.
The two years from 2025 into 2026 gave India its richest run of dealmaking on record. By the EY count, M&A value crossed roughly 123 billion dollars in 2025, up almost a fifth on the year before, and the momentum carried straight into 2026 with the largest pharmaceutical acquisition an Indian company has ever attempted. Sovereign funds bought into family snack empires. A Gulf bank took control of a listed Indian bank for the first time. A bankrupt infrastructure giant changed hands inside a tribunal. Each of these is a working example of a legal mechanism you are expected to know.
This is not a finance round-up. It is a reading list. For each of the twelve deals below, the numbers matter, but the structure matters more. One deal teaches you how a mandatory open offer works under the takeover code. Another shows you a scheme of arrangement sanctioned by the National Company Law Tribunal. A third walks you through a resolution plan under the insolvency code, complete with a losing bidder who would not go quietly. Read them as case studies, because that is how a good corporate lawyer reads the newspaper.
If you are a law student trying to build genuine M&A literacy, a young associate staffed on your first deal, or a company secretary mapping which regulator clears what, the same lesson repeats. The size of a deal is the headline. The legal plumbing underneath it is the education. Here are the twelve that taught the most.
The biggest M&A deals in India across 2025 and 2026 were led by Sun Pharma’s roughly 11.75 billion dollar all-cash acquisition of the United States women’s health company Organon, Tata Motors’ 3.8 billion euro takeover of Italy’s Iveco Group, Emirates NBD’s roughly 3 billion dollar purchase of a controlling stake in RBL Bank, the Bajaj Group’s 2.6 billion euro buyout of Allianz’s stake in their insurance joint ventures, and Coforge’s 2.35 billion dollar all-stock acquisition of Encora. Other landmark transactions included Adani’s resolution-plan takeover of Jaiprakash Associates under the insolvency code, Wilmar’s consolidation of Adani Wilmar, and Torrent Pharma’s acquisition of JB Chemicals from KKR.
What follows is the full list, ranked roughly by headline value, with the legal structure and the lesson spelled out for each. After the twelve, there is a section on the six legal mechanisms these deals share, and a short guide to studying deals the way practitioners do.
How to read this list: the M&A toolkit behind the deals
Before the deals, a quick orientation, because the same handful of legal tools appears again and again. If you learn to spot them, every deal announcement becomes a problem you already know how to solve.
The first tool is the scheme of arrangement. When two Indian companies actually merge, or when one absorbs another, the combination usually happens through a scheme under Sections 230 to 232 of the Companies Act, 2013, sanctioned by the National Company Law Tribunal. The tribunal checks fairness, creditors and shareholders vote, and the merger takes legal effect on a court-approved date. The second tool is the mandatory open offer under the SEBI takeover code, which forces an acquirer who crosses 25 percent of a listed company, or who acquires control, to offer an exit to public shareholders. The third is competition clearance: any large combination needs approval from the Competition Commission of India before it can close, and the Commission can attach conditions or block it.
The fourth tool lives in distress. When a company is insolvent, it is not bought through a normal share purchase but acquired through a resolution plan under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016, approved by the creditors and sanctioned by the tribunal under Section 31. The fifth is sectoral and foreign-investment regulation: a bank deal needs the Reserve Bank of India, an insurance deal needs the insurance regulator, and a foreign buyer must fit India’s foreign direct investment rules. The sixth is the humble share purchase agreement and the joint-venture exit, the private contracts that sit under almost every transaction.
Keep those six in mind. The twelve deals below are, between them, a complete tour of the toolkit. For the bigger picture of how these pieces fit together, our guide to mergers and acquisitions in India maps the whole process from due diligence to closing, and the overview of India’s capital markets sets the regulatory stage.
1. Sun Pharma and Organon: the 11.75 billion dollar cross-border bet
The largest deal of the period is also the largest acquisition an Indian pharmaceutical company has ever made. In April 2026, Sun Pharmaceutical Industries agreed to buy Organon, the New York-listed women’s health and biosimilars company spun off from Merck, for about 11.75 billion dollars in an all-cash deal. Organon shareholders are to receive 14.00 dollars a share, a premium of roughly 103 percent over the unaffected price before the deal leaked, with closing targeted for early 2027 subject to Organon’s shareholders and to regulators in multiple countries.
The legal interest here is everything that surrounds an all-cash purchase of a United States public company by an Indian acquirer. This is not an Indian scheme of arrangement. It is a merger governed by the target’s home-country corporate law, executed through a merger agreement and a shareholder vote, and conditioned on antitrust and foreign-investment clearances across the United States, Europe and other markets where the combined business will operate. Sun is funding it with cash on hand plus committed bank financing, which is why deal lawyers pay attention to the financing condition and the leverage the buyer takes on.
For a law student, this deal is a lesson in scale and in jurisdiction. The acquirer is Indian, but the rulebook is largely foreign, and the deal will live or die on regulatory approvals in markets that have nothing to do with Indian law. It also shows why outbound M&A is its own specialism: the lawyers who run a transaction like this are coordinating counsel in half a dozen countries, each with its own merger-control regime and its own definition of when a deal is anti-competitive.
2. Tata Motors and Iveco: a tender offer with a carve-out
In July 2025, Tata Motors agreed to acquire Iveco Group, the Italian commercial-vehicle maker, in an all-cash deal worth about 3.8 billion euros, or roughly 4.4 billion dollars, at 14.10 euros a share. It is Tata’s biggest automotive acquisition since it bought Jaguar Land Rover in 2008, and it creates a global truck-and-bus business with combined revenue near 22 billion euros spread across Europe, India and the Americas.
The structure rewards a close read. Iveco is incorporated in the Netherlands and listed in Milan, so the acquisition runs as a voluntary public tender offer under European takeover law, recommended by Iveco’s board, rather than as an Indian-style merger. More instructive still is the condition precedent: the deal only completes once Iveco separates its defence business. Iveco agreed to sell that defence arm, including the IDV and Astra brands, to Italy’s Leonardo for 1.7 billion euros, carving it out before Tata takes over the civilian truck business.
That carve-out is the teachable moment. Acquirers frequently do not want the whole target. They want a clean business without the politically sensitive or strategically awkward parts, and so the deal is engineered to strip those out first. Defence assets are a classic example, because foreign ownership of a defence supplier raises national-security questions in almost every country. A student who understands why the defence unit had to leave before Tata could arrive understands one of the most common reasons real deals are structured in stages.
3. Emirates NBD and RBL Bank: a foreign bank takes control
In October 2025, Dubai’s Emirates NBD agreed to take a controlling stake in RBL Bank, and by June 2026 it had completed the acquisition of about 60 percent of the bank through a primary capital infusion of roughly 3 billion dollars, around 26,850 crore rupees. It is the largest foreign direct investment ever made in India’s banking sector, and the first time a foreign bank has acquired a controlling, majority stake in a profitable Indian bank.
This deal is a compact lesson in regulated-sector M&A. A foreign bank cannot simply buy an Indian bank the way it might buy a software company. The transaction needed clearance from the Reserve Bank of India, which controls bank ownership tightly, and approval from the Government of India, which came in May 2026. The money went in as a primary infusion, meaning new shares were issued to the buyer through a preferential allotment rather than the buyer purchasing existing shares from someone else. Because that allotment, together with the open offer, took Emirates NBD past the takeover-code thresholds, it also triggered a mandatory open offer to RBL’s public shareholders.
For a student, the value is in seeing how many gates a single deal passes through. Banking regulation, foreign-investment policy, the takeover code and listing rules all apply at once, and each has its own approval and its own clock. The reason a foreign buyer pays a premium and waits the better part of a year is that control of a deposit-taking bank is one of the most heavily regulated assets in any economy. The deal also signals a real shift, because the RBI has gradually opened the door to higher foreign ownership of Indian banks, and this is the clearest test of that opening so far.
4. Bajaj and Allianz: unwinding a 24-year joint venture
Not every deal is about buying something new. Some are about buying out a partner. In March 2025, Allianz agreed to sell its 26 percent stake in its two Indian insurance joint ventures, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance and Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance, to the Bajaj Group for about 2.6 billion euros, roughly 2.8 billion dollars. The price split into about 13,780 crore rupees for the general insurer and 10,400 crore rupees for the life insurer, and it ended a partnership that had run for nearly a quarter of a century, leaving Bajaj with effectively full ownership.
A joint-venture exit is a different legal animal from an acquisition. The relationship was governed for years by a shareholders’ agreement, and that agreement almost always contains the exit machinery: call and put options, rights of first refusal, and a method for valuing the departing partner’s stake. When a long JV ends, the dispute is usually not whether the partner can leave but at what price, and the contract drafted decades earlier supplies the answer. Insurance adds a regulatory layer, because a change in the ownership of an insurer requires approval from the insurance regulator, and India caps foreign holding in insurers.
The lesson for a student is that the most important document in this deal was signed in 2001, not 2025. Whoever drafted the original shareholders’ agreement, and in particular the valuation and exit clauses, shaped how this multi-billion-dollar separation played out. It is a reminder that joint-venture drafting is M&A in slow motion: the deal terms you negotiate at the start determine the deal you are forced into at the end.
5. Coforge and Encora: paying in shares, not cash
In December 2025, the IT-services company Coforge agreed to acquire Encora, an AI-focused technology firm, at an enterprise value of 2.35 billion dollars, and closed it in April 2026. What makes the deal worth studying is not the price but the currency. Coforge did not pay cash. It paid in its own shares, issuing roughly 93.8 million new shares so that Encora’s private-equity owners, Advent International and Warburg Pincus, ended up holding about 20 percent of Coforge.
An all-stock, or share-swap, deal raises questions a cash deal never does. The buyer is not handing over money; it is handing over a slice of itself, which dilutes its existing shareholders. That makes the exchange ratio, how many buyer shares each unit of the target is worth, the single most negotiated number in the transaction, and it makes the relative valuation of both companies central. The sellers, in turn, do not walk away with cash. They become large shareholders in the combined company, betting that the shares they receive will be worth more than the business they gave up.
For a student, this is the cleanest available illustration of why deal consideration is a choice with consequences. Cash is certain but expensive and often debt-funded. Stock conserves cash and aligns the seller with the combined company’s future, but it dilutes existing owners and ties the seller’s payout to the buyer’s share price. Knowing when a client should pay in cash, in stock, or in a mix is one of the first judgement calls a corporate lawyer learns to advise on.
6. Adani and Jaiprakash Associates: M&A inside the insolvency code
Some companies are not bought on the open market. They are acquired out of bankruptcy. Jaiprakash Associates, the debt-laden cement, construction and real-estate group, entered insolvency in June 2024 on a petition by ICICI Bank, and a contest began for control of its assets. In March 2026, the National Company Law Tribunal at Allahabad approved a resolution plan from Adani Enterprises worth roughly 15,000 crore rupees, after the committee of creditors backed Adani’s bid with about 94 percent of the vote in November 2025.
This is M&A through the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016, and the mechanics are entirely different from a normal purchase. There is no negotiation with the old owners, because in insolvency they have lost control to the creditors. Instead, rival suitors submit resolution plans, the committee of creditors evaluates them on recovery and certainty and votes, and the winning plan is sanctioned by the tribunal under Section 31, binding everyone, including dissenting creditors and the displaced promoters. The acquirer takes the company on a clean slate, free of most past liabilities, which is exactly why distressed assets attract strategic buyers.
What makes this deal a teaching case is that the loser fought back. Vedanta, a rival bidder, challenged the outcome before the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal, which dismissed the appeal and upheld the creditors’ commercial wisdom. That sequence, competing plans, a creditor vote, tribunal approval and an appeal, is the standard arc of a contested insolvency, and the appellate tribunal’s deference to the commercial decision of the creditors is one of the most heavily litigated principles in Indian insolvency law. A student who follows this deal sees the entire resolution process compressed into a single, high-profile fight.
7. Wilmar and Adani Wilmar: a promoter exit and the public-float rule
The food company behind the Fortune brand changed hands in 2025, and the way it happened is a lesson in listed-company housekeeping. Adani Enterprises decided to exit its 44 percent stake in Adani Wilmar, since renamed AWL Agri Business, as part of a retreat from non-core businesses. It agreed in July 2025 to sell up to 31 percent to its joint-venture partner, Singapore’s Wilmar International, for about 10,874 crore rupees, and sold the rest to public investors, realising around 15,707 crore rupees in total and leaving Wilmar as the sole promoter.
The structure was dictated by a rule every listed-company lawyer knows: minimum public shareholding. Indian listed companies must keep at least 25 percent of their shares in public hands, so when Adani Wilmar listed, the promoters were always going to have to sell down over time. Adani used an offer for sale, a quick exchange-based mechanism for a promoter to sell a large block to the public, to place part of its stake, while transferring control of the block to Wilmar. The two legs together solved both problems at once: Adani got its full exit, and the company stayed compliant with the public-float floor.
For a student, the deal connects an abstract listing rule to a concrete transaction. The 25 percent public-shareholding requirement is not a footnote; it shapes how promoters of listed companies can ever cash out. The offer-for-sale route, the block deal, and the staggered timing all flow from that single constraint. It is also a clean example of a joint venture ending not in a fight but in one partner buying the other out and taking the brand global.
8. Haldiram’s, Temasek and the minority-stake deal
Not every deal transfers control. Some of the most consequential transactions are minority investments, and the contest for a piece of Haldiram’s is the best recent example. In March 2025, Singapore’s sovereign fund Temasek acquired close to a 10 percent stake in the snacks business of Haldiram’s for about 1 billion dollars, valuing the company at roughly 10 billion dollars. Abu Dhabi’s IHC and Alpha Wave Global followed with a further minority stake at the same valuation, while Blackstone, which had chased the deal, walked away over price and over how soon the company should go public.
A minority deal turns on the shareholders’ agreement, not on a transfer of control. The investor is buying influence and economics, not command, so the negotiation is about protective rights: a board seat or two, veto rights over major decisions such as new debt or a change of business, information rights, and an agreed path to an exit, usually an initial public offering. The Blackstone story is the instructive part. It collapsed because the buyer wanted a lower valuation and a faster IPO than the family was willing to give, which is a reminder that price and exit timing are deal terms, and that walking away is itself a strategy.
The lesson for a student is that control is not the only thing money buys. A 10 percent stake at a 10 billion dollar valuation comes with a thick contract that governs what the investor can demand and how it can eventually get its money back. Learning to read a shareholders’ agreement, the rights it grants a minority investor and the limits it places on the founders, is as central to corporate practice as understanding a full acquisition. It is also a window into how family businesses raise growth capital without losing the family’s grip.
9. AM Green and Greenko: a combination the CCI had to clear
In March 2025, the Competition Commission of India approved a green-energy transaction that shows the merger-control system at work. AM Green Power agreed to acquire about 17.5 percent of Greenko Energy Holdings from Japan’s Orix for roughly 1.28 billion dollars, with Orix in turn putting around 731 million dollars into convertible notes of a related AM Green entity. The deal lifted AM Green’s stake in Greenko to about a quarter, alongside large holdings by Singapore’s GIC and Abu Dhabi’s ADIA.
The headline here is competition law. Any combination above the financial thresholds in the Competition Act, 2002 must be notified to the Competition Commission of India and cannot close until the Commission clears it. The Commission examines whether the deal causes an appreciable adverse effect on competition, and it can approve unconditionally, approve with remedies, or block the transaction. For deals that clearly do not harm competition, India offers a fast green-channel route to near-automatic approval, while genuinely concerning deals go to a deeper review. The full framework is set out in our explainer on CCI merger control and the deal-value threshold.
For a student, the lesson is that competition clearance is a gate every large deal must pass, not an afterthought. The Commission’s approval, recorded in a public order, is often the last hurdle before a transaction can close, and the timing of that approval drives the deal calendar. The AM Green and Greenko transaction also shows how layered modern energy ownership has become, with sovereign funds, strategic investors and convertible instruments all stacked into a single combination that the regulator had to untangle.
10. Torrent Pharma and JB Chemicals: the full public-M&A toolkit
If you could study only one deal on this list, study this one, because it uses almost every tool at once. In June 2025, Torrent Pharmaceuticals agreed to acquire control of J.B. Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals from the private-equity firm KKR, in a transaction that valued JB Pharma at about 25,689 crore rupees. The deal positions Torrent among India’s most valuable pharmaceutical companies, and it delivered KKR a return of more than five times on the stake it had bought from the founding family in 2020.
The structure is a three-stage textbook. First, Torrent buys KKR’s roughly 46 percent controlling block under a share purchase agreement, at 1,600 rupees a share. Second, because that purchase takes Torrent past the takeover-code threshold and hands it control, it triggers a mandatory open offer to JB Pharma’s public shareholders, here at 1,639.18 rupees a share for up to 26 percent of the company. Third, JB Pharma is to be merged into Torrent through a scheme of arrangement sanctioned by the National Company Law Tribunal, with JB shareholders receiving Torrent shares in an agreed ratio rather than cash.
That sequence, private share purchase, then public open offer, then court-sanctioned merger, is the spine of most public-company acquisitions in India, and seeing all three in one deal is rare. A student who can explain why each stage is necessary, the contract that transfers control, the open offer that protects minority holders, and the scheme that completes the absorption, has understood the architecture of Indian public M&A. It also shows the private-equity life cycle in miniature: KKR bought control, ran the business for a few years, and sold to a strategic buyer at a large profit, which is exactly what a buyout fund is built to do.
11. Sapphire Foods and Devyani: a merger of equals by share swap
In January 2026, two of India’s largest quick-service restaurant operators agreed to combine. Sapphire Foods, which runs KFC and Pizza Hut outlets, agreed to merge with Devyani International, the country’s biggest Yum! Brands franchisee, in an all-stock deal valued at roughly 934 million dollars, creating the largest KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell operator in the region. Because both companies are listed and neither is simply buying the other for cash, the combination runs as a merger by share swap.
The legal structure is a scheme of arrangement under the Companies Act, 2013, sanctioned by the National Company Law Tribunal, in which one listed company is absorbed into the other and its shareholders receive shares of the surviving company in a fixed ratio. The negotiation centres on that swap ratio, which is supported by independent valuation reports and a fairness opinion, because every shareholder of the disappearing company needs to be satisfied that the exchange is fair. The deal also needs competition clearance, given the combined company’s footprint across the same restaurant brands.
For a student, the interest lies in the related-party dimension. The two companies share overlapping investors and the same franchisor relationship with Yum! Brands, so the fairness of the swap ratio comes under closer scrutiny than it would between strangers. When the people on both sides of a merger are connected, the law leans harder on independent valuation, board committees and disclosure to protect minority shareholders. This deal is a good prompt to learn how Indian law polices a merger where the buyer and the seller are not at arm’s length.
12. UltraTech and India Cements: an open offer, worked out
The last deal is the cleanest available worked example of a mandatory open offer, the single most tested concept in Indian takeover law. UltraTech Cement, already the country’s largest cement maker, agreed to buy a 32.72 percent stake in The India Cements from its promoters for 3,954 crore rupees, a deal that received competition clearance and completed in 2025, taking UltraTech’s holding above 55 percent and making it the controlling promoter.
Because acquiring that stake gave UltraTech both more than 25 percent and clear control, the takeover code required it to make an open offer to India Cements’ public shareholders. UltraTech offered to buy a further 26 percent of the company, about 8.05 crore shares, at 390 rupees a share, completing the acquisition in line with Regulation 22(2) of the SEBI takeover regulations. The numbers make the abstract concrete: a controlling stake bought privately, then an offer to the public for the standard 26 percent, at a price fixed by the code’s formula.
For a student, this is the deal to dissect when learning the takeover code, because there is nothing hidden. You can see the trigger, crossing 25 percent and acquiring control, the mandatory minimum size of 26 percent, and the offer price, all in one transaction. It also sits inside the larger story of cement-sector consolidation, in which the biggest players have been buying up smaller regional companies, each acquisition forcing its own open offer. If you want to understand why the takeover code exists and how it runs in practice, trace this deal from the share purchase to the open-offer payment.
What these 12 deals teach you about M&A law
Step back from the individual transactions and the same six mechanisms keep reappearing. That repetition is the real syllabus. A student who can name the legal tool behind a deal, just from reading the announcement, is already thinking like a corporate lawyer.
Competition clearance runs through the whole list. AM Green and Greenko needed it, UltraTech and India Cements needed it, Sapphire and Devyani need it, and every large combination here had to satisfy the Competition Commission of India before closing. The mandatory open offer under the SEBI takeover code shows up wherever control of a listed company changes hands, most clearly in UltraTech, Torrent and Emirates NBD. The scheme of arrangement before the National Company Law Tribunal is how the actual mergers happen, in Torrent and JB, and in Sapphire and Devyani. The insolvency code is the route when the target is bankrupt, as Adani’s takeover of Jaiprakash Associates shows. Sectoral and foreign-investment regulation governs the bank deal and the insurance deal. And underneath all of them sit the private contracts: the share purchase agreement, the shareholders’ agreement, and the joint-venture exit terms.
A second pattern is jurisdictional reach. Three of the four biggest deals are cross-border, with Indian companies buying abroad or foreign buyers acquiring in India, and each one answers to more than one country’s regulators. Cross-border M&A is no longer exotic; it is where the largest Indian deals now happen, and it demands lawyers who can coordinate counsel across jurisdictions. A third pattern is the form of payment. Some buyers paid cash, some paid in their own shares, and that single choice rippled through everything from dilution to who controlled the combined company.
The lesson is to stop reading deals as finance and start reading them as structure. Ask three questions of every transaction: who is buying what, through which legal mechanism, and which regulators have to say yes. Answer those, and you have understood the deal in the way that matters for legal practice.
How to turn deal-watching into M&A skills
Reading about deals is the easy part. Turning that reading into the ability to actually work on one takes a deliberate habit, and law school rarely teaches it directly. The good news is that the raw material is public and free.
Start with primary documents. When a listed company announces a deal, it files disclosures with the stock exchanges, and an open offer generates a public announcement, a detailed public statement and a letter of offer, all available online. Read them. A single real letter of offer teaches more about the takeover code than a chapter of summary, because it shows you the actual price calculation, the timeline and the conditions. For mergers, the scheme of arrangement and the tribunal’s order are public once filed, and they reveal how the swap ratio was justified and which objections the court had to deal with. For insolvency deals, the tribunal’s approval order under Section 31 lays out the whole resolution.
Then build the three-question habit from the previous section and apply it to every deal you see in the news. Who is buying what, through which mechanism, and which regulators must approve. Write the answer in two sentences. Within a few months you will recognise structures on sight, and you will start to notice when a deal is taking an unusual route and ask why. That instinct, the sense that a structure is doing work, is what separates a lawyer who can run a deal from one who has only read about them. If you want to put the doctrine on a firmer footing while you do this, the iPleaders guide to mergers and acquisitions in India walks through each stage of a transaction in order, from valuation and due diligence to the closing mechanics these deals illustrate.
Frequently asked questions
What was the biggest M&A deal in India in 2025-2026?
The largest was Sun Pharma’s acquisition of the United States women’s health company Organon, an all-cash deal worth about 11.75 billion dollars announced in April 2026. It is the biggest acquisition ever made by an Indian pharmaceutical company and one of the largest outbound deals in India’s history.
What is the difference between a merger and an acquisition?
In an acquisition, one company buys control of another, which continues to exist as a separate entity or is later absorbed. In a merger, two companies combine into one, usually through a scheme of arrangement sanctioned by the National Company Law Tribunal, with the shareholders of the disappearing company receiving shares of the surviving one. The terms overlap in practice, which is why they are usually paired as “M&A”.
Why do some M&A deals need an open offer?
Under the SEBI (Substantial Acquisition of Shares and Takeovers) Regulations, 2011, an acquirer who crosses 25 percent of a listed company, or who acquires control, must make an open offer to buy at least 26 percent more from public shareholders. The open offer gives ordinary shareholders a chance to exit on terms comparable to the deal that changed control, as seen in the UltraTech, Torrent and Emirates NBD transactions.
How is a bankrupt company acquired in India?
A bankrupt company is acquired through a resolution plan under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016. Rival bidders submit plans, the committee of creditors votes to choose one, and the National Company Law Tribunal sanctions the winning plan under Section 31, which binds all stakeholders. Adani Enterprises acquired Jaiprakash Associates this way in 2026.
What approvals does a foreign company need to acquire an Indian company?
It depends on the sector. Every large deal needs clearance from the Competition Commission of India, and the acquisition must comply with India’s foreign direct investment rules. Regulated sectors add their own approvals: a bank deal needs the Reserve Bank of India, and an insurance deal needs the insurance regulator, as the Emirates NBD and Bajaj Allianz deals show.
What is the role of the National Company Law Tribunal in M&A?
The National Company Law Tribunal sanctions mergers and demergers carried out through a scheme of arrangement under Sections 230 to 232 of the Companies Act, 2013, after checking that the scheme is fair and that creditors and shareholders have approved it. It also approves resolution plans in insolvency under Section 31 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016.
Why do companies pay for acquisitions in shares instead of cash?
Paying in shares conserves cash and aligns the seller with the future of the combined company, but it dilutes the buyer’s existing shareholders and ties the seller’s payout to the buyer’s share price. Coforge used an all-stock structure to acquire Encora, giving Encora’s private-equity owners about 20 percent of Coforge rather than cash.
Are these M&A deals relevant for law students and exams?
Yes. Each deal is a working example of a core concept in corporate and securities law: open offers, schemes of arrangement, competition clearance, insolvency resolution and cross-border structuring. Using current deals as case studies is one of the most effective ways to learn M&A, because it ties abstract rules to real numbers and real disputes.
References
- EY India M&A Report 2026 and EY newsroom, India M&A activity 2025.
- Sun Pharma signs definitive agreement to acquire Organon (Organon, April 2026).
- Tata Motors to acquire Iveco Group (Iveco Group, July 2025).
- Emirates NBD completes majority stake acquisition in RBL Bank (Business Standard, June 2026).
- Allianz to sell its 26% stake in its Indian insurance joint ventures (Allianz, March 2025).
- Coforge announces successful closure of the Encora acquisition (Coforge, April 2026).
- NCLT Allahabad approves Adani’s resolution plan for Jaiprakash Associates (March 2026); NCLAT dismisses Vedanta’s challenge.
- Adani to sell entire AWL Agri stake to Wilmar and others for 10,874 crore (Business Standard, July 2025).
- Temasek acquires 10% stake in Haldiram’s snacks business for 1 billion dollars (Business Standard, March 2025).
- CCI approves AM Green Power’s acquisition in Greenko Energy Holdings (Press Information Bureau, March 2025).
- Torrent Pharma to acquire controlling stake in J.B. Chemicals from KKR (KKR / Business Wire, June 2025).
- UltraTech Cement secures CCI nod for 3,954 crore India Cements acquisition (India Infoline, 2025).
Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal or financial advice. Deal values, structures and regulatory approvals are based on public announcements available as of the date above and may change as transactions are completed, amended or challenged. Some deals remain subject to shareholder, regulatory or court approval at the time of writing. Readers should verify the current status of any transaction from primary filings and consult a qualified corporate lawyer before acting on any matter discussed here.
