Big Think Interview With Cyril Shroff | Big Think

Big Think Interview With Cyril Shroff

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A conversation with the Managing Partner of Amarchand and Mangaldas.

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Cyril Shroff:

Mr Cyril Shroff is a managing partner of Amarchand & Mangaldas & Suresh A Shroff & Co - India's largest and foremost law firm, with approximately 450 lawyers. Amarchand Mangaldas has offices at Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata and Hyderabad. With over 25 years of experience in a range of areas, including corporate laws, securities markets, banking, infrastructure and others, Mr Shroff is regarded and has been consistently rated as India's top corporate, banking and project finance lawyer by several international surveys including those conducted by International Financial Law Review (IFLR), Euromoney, Chambers Global, Asia Legal 500, Asia Law and others.

Mr Shroff has authored several publications on legal topics. He is a visiting lecturer of securities law at the Government Law College. He is a member of the advisory board of the Centre on Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry, established by the Harvard Law School, and a member of the advisory board of the National Institute of Securities Markets (NISM).

Mr Shroff is a member of the executive council of the legal practice division (LPD) of the International Bar Association (IBA) and the advisory board of the Asia-Pacific forum of the IBA. He is a member of the Media Legal Defence Initiative (MLDI) international advisory board. He is also a member of the primary markets advisory committee of the Securities and Exchange Board of India. Mr Shroff is also part of various committees of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) - the national council on corporate governance, the national committee on commodities markets, the subcommittee on financial investors, the national committee on regulatory affairs and the national committee on capital markets. He has also been a member of several governmental and other regulatory committees on law reform concerning the corporate and securities market, bankruptcy laws, commercialisation of infrastructure, etc.

Mr Shroff was admitted to the Bar in 1982 after receiving his BA and LLB degrees from the Government Law College in Mumbai. He has been a solicitor at the Bombay High Court since 1983.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How is India approaching the financial crisis?

Cyril Shroff: India has not really had, a sort of severe impact for the financial crisis. The impact had been somewhat muted because of prudent financial management as well as some basic structure factor which have insulated it from the global financial crisis. And I could recite specific reasons for that, for some of them include the fact that our economy had been primarily domestic focus of the dependents on rest for demand as well as for capital has also been somewhat limited. Secondly, our financial system has always pursued the policy of more prudent management. Our banks are well-capitalized. We have not had exposure to toxic assets and these are some of the factors that have contributed to insulating us somewhat from global conditions.

Question: Is India similar to an E.U. country in its approach?

Cyril Shroff: If I would compare with European country I think it’s still much, much better off. Our financial institutions, not even one of them is broke. Even in the beginning, of this sub-prime crisis the only impact was the fact that there was actually increase liquidity into India as a result of Fed rate cuts in the US. So the regulatory response was really to try and sterilize the extra liquidity that was coming in. As far as the second major milestone event in the financial crisis, the Lehman bankruptcy even that didn’t have much of an impact because their little counterparty risk which Indian banks had to Lehman or events which flew out of that. So we’ve had a muted impact. That being said, the global conditions have had some impact as much as capital flows have been reduced and have been more subdued, our capital markets have, our stock markets have fallen quite significantly since the peak. They are reviving in more recent weeks but they had at one point of time come down quite sharply.

Question: What makes doing business in India different than doing it in the West?

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