About

Anand Vardhan joined Piramal Group in 2013 taking care of the legal function of its private equity, NBFC and realty business arm which in last 5 years have been consolidated as Piramal Capital & Housing Finance (Piramal Capital). Piramal Capital is the financial services platform of Piramal Group following the merger of Piramal Finance & Piramal Capital into Piramal Housing Finance. It is engaged in various financial services businesses providing both wholesale and retail funding opportunities across sectors. He had held several managerial positions in the legal function at leading businesses like Tata Housing and ICICI Bank before joining HDFC Venture Capital as assistant vice president and head of legal and prior to joining Piramal, he was the general counsel of SUN-Apollo Ventures. In his time at Primal, Vardhan has standardised transaction documents, set up a centralised litigation team, and integrated the 25-member legal team of the entire financial services platform as one team. He identifies that these initiatives have helped improve overall performance ‘and reduced dependence on external lawyers’, adding, ‘the involvement of the litigation team is yielding positive results, as counterparties are willing to come to the table to settle their dues, rather than bear the risk of litigation’. Recently, Vardhan and his team have worked on strategic partnerships with leading global pension funds such as CPPIB, APG and Ivanhoe Cambridge and orchestrated one of the largest equity fund raisings worth US$450m from Warburg Pincus and Goldman Sachs for Piramal Realty. Vardhan’s leadership and prompt legal support has contributed in making Piramal Capital the leading lender of the country achieving a book size of more than INR 50,000 crores in the last 3 years. He identifies the changing nature of the in-house counsel saying, ‘the role of in-house legal has metamorphosed from proffering a purely advisory role on risk mitigation into a more strategic and central role, where they are expected to provide thought leadership on new business initiatives and contribute to the company’s bottom-line’.