“Could I catch up on some sleep just for a few hours?” was the first message Anshuman Thakur typed out to a senior colleague around noon Tuesday, right after finishing a call with Ajit Mohan, Facebook‘s India boss.
Thakur, a former telecoms rainmaker at NM Rothschild and Morgan Stanley, and now head of strategy and planning at Reliance, had been working the phones since 4am, readying the final raft of documents hours before Facebook announced its mega-deal. This was the most high-profile deal in Thakur’s career. The fact that the deal, WIP for a year, was getting baked bang in the middle of a global pandemic compounded the complexity.
And truth be told, the pandemic had tripped up the plans. Well, almost.
Thakur and his team of dealmakers were to fly to Facebook’s Menlo Park home on March 16 to begin talks with Facebook’s Raj Singh, actioning a non-binding term sheet signed in January.
A codename – Project Redwood – was coined for the core deal team of about 30 executives, reflecting perhaps the deep California connect. Like sycamore, sequoia or Oregon ash and white alder, redwood is a popular tree native to California, Facebook’s home.
Facebook spent a billion dollars last September to build an expanded corporate home called MPK 21, designed by architect Frank Gehry and seating about 3,000 employees. The redwood forest in a courtyard and the 3.6-acre rooftop garden, along with a tiered outdoor amphitheatre akin to a botanical garden, etched deep resonance for many.
Until late winter, the going was smooth. Legal and tax diligence began by February under RIL veteran K Raja Ramachandran, with the commercial deal already in place. Lawyers – AZB and Davis Poke for Reliance and Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas and Hogan Lovells for Facebook – joined tax auditors PWC and the two lead bankers Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Reliance and its adviser Morgan Stanley, led by its head of global technology, investment banking, had opened up the data room around the second week of March. From India, telecoms-media-technology banker Kamal Yadav was the pointsman, but a face-to-face meeting was a must “to connect the dots.”
Thakur did not speak to ET for this article, which was pieced together after talking to at least half a dozen people directly involved.
The lockdown made meetings impossible. “Only VCs were the way out,” said an official involved. The first such “virtual meeting” took place around the weekend before Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown on March 25.
“The aim was to make the announcement by March 31,” said a deal insider. “That did not happen but we are not far out either.”
Reliance also needed some good news. For seven years, chairman Mukesh Ambani was on a $100-billion spending spree, building the world’s largest 4G network. But a bloated balance sheet could pinch. A deal with Aramco is pending, as is a $8-billion Brookfield InvIT deal.
So, Blue Jeans and Zoom brought the participants together – daily, irrespective of the time zone difference between Mumbai and California.
“Manoj Modi would only come in to fill in the big strategic issues. Even at Facebook, they would circle back with Zuk (Zuckerberg),” said another official. “Once at around 8 am IST and again around 9 PM IST, we would regroup to thrash out the details,” said an official in the deal team.
Morgan Stanley may have missed out on the Aramco mandate, but it got Sony to talk to Reliance to merge the entertainment business. That deal is in the final laps.
But sources say Ambani and Zuckerberg considered collaboration 14 months ago. Gen-next Akash and Manoj Modi, Ambani’s aide, were part of the A-Team to front the dialogue. Mohan’s appointment as Facebook India MD helped speed up matters. “No longer would anyone blame us for not investing enough dollars in India,” quipped an official. “This cheque should silence many.”
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