Mukesh Ambani Gives Anil Ambani Rs 23,000 Crore Relief

Anil Ambani’s struggling telecom operations received a bail-out from elder brother Mukesh’s Reliance Jio+ as the siblings announced a wide-ranging, but expected, deal for spectrum, towers and optic fibre assets on their father’s birthday.

While the companies are yet to announce the deal size, it is estimated to be worth around Rs 23,000 crore, a massive relief for Anil’s debt-ridden Reliance Communications (RCom) that is saddled with loans of nearly Rs 45,000 crore and was facing possible bankruptcy proceedings.

The deal, announced late on Thursday evening, marks the exit of Anil’s RCom from the consumer telecom space, a business he received in 2005 as part of a bitterly-fought family settlement with Mukesh+ . He had already stopped the company’s consumer 2G and 3G operations at the end of November, deciding to continue with only the enterprise business as well as sale of assets. The company’s recent struggles to stay afloat are in sharp contrast to its heyday in 2010, when it was India’s second largest mobile operator.

“RCom has signed definitive binding agreements with Jio for sale of wireless spectrum, tower, fibre and media convergence node (MCN) assets… Jio emerged as the highest bidder in a transparent process conducted under the supervision of a high-powered Bid Evaluation Committee, comprising experts from banking, telecom and law,” the company said, adding that it expects the transactions to close in a “phased manner” between January and March 2018, subject to lenders’ and other applicable approvals.