Legal Tangle

  Adv. Sreeraj Muralidharan,   BBM, FCS, LLB, CFORA Email: Advsreerajm@gmail.com For over two decades, India’s international tax landscape has been shaped as much by statutory law as by a series of negotiated silences—spaces where treaty language, corporate structuring, and judicial restraint coexisted in uneasy balance. The Supreme Court’s ruling against Tiger Global in relation to the 2018 Flipkart stake sale marks a decisive moment where that balance has finally tilted in favour of substance, economic reality, and fiscal sovereignty. The controversy arose from Tiger Global’s exit from Flipkart in 2018, when Walmart acquired a controlling stake in the Indian e-commerce giant. Tiger Global, through its Mauritius-based entity, claimed exemption from capital gains tax under the India–Mauritius Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA), asserting treaty protection for the gains arising from the transaction. The Delhi High Court had earlier accepted this position. The Supreme ...

  When systems act at scale, accountability does not disappear. It returns to the room where approval was given.   Adv. Sreeraj Muralidharan,   BBM, FCS, LLB, CFORA Email: Advsreerajm@gmail.com The recent noise around Grok has been discussed largely as a technology issue. That is an easy way to talk about it. It keeps the conversation safely distant. But what really unfolded was something most founders recognise immediately, even if they don’t articulate it often. A system was allowed to operate at scale. It behaved in a way that surprised people. And suddenly, explanation was required. At that moment, no one was interested in how the system worked. The questions were not about models or architecture. They were about judgment. Who allowed this? Why was it permitted to operate this way? At what point should someone have stepped in? That instinct is not unique to governments or regulators. It is how accountability works everywhere that power exists. Anyone who has bui...

    Adv. Sreeraj Muralidharan,   BBM, FCS, LLB, CFORA Email: Advsreerajm@gmail.com A few weeks ago, a company came to me after a large investment collapsed. The diligence was complete. The investors had made up their minds. There was nothing left to discuss or negotiate. What unsettled the promoters was not the failure itself, but the banality of its causes. There was no fraud. No scandal. No single moment where someone could say, this is where it went wrong. Instead, there were years of small, reasonable decisions—taken during good times—when trust felt sufficient and formality felt unnecessary. Shareholding arrangements that were “understood”, not recorded. Related-party transactions explained across tables, not in contracts. Governance that relied on relationships rather than records. Each decision made sense when it was taken. Together, they told a story no serious investor was prepared to inherit. By the time I was consulted, the outcome was already sealed—not ...