It is now official that there is going to be no merger between Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communications (RCom) and South African telecom giant MTN. Both the parties declared on Friday, July 18 that they had amicably decided to let the exclusivity agreement between them phase out. 

The talks about a merger between RCom and MTN looked quite possible until Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) entered the picture. The merger talks just went off track after the senior Ambani claimed that RIL holds the first right of refusal on RCom shares, as part of an agreement at the time of partition of the Reliance empire.

The RComm and MTN were supposed to swap shares under this deal, but this could not happen after the intervention of RIL. The RCom-MTN deal breathed its last when Reliance Industries Ltd decided to go for arbitration and appointed retired Supreme Court judge B P Jeevan Reddy as arbitrator on Thursday. 

It was on July 21 that the merger deal was actually slated to expire, but Reliance Communications and MTN decided to terminate it on July 18 itself on grounds of ‘certain legal and regulatory issues’. Commenting on this development, sources remarked that none would prefer getting embroiled in legal problems. This implies that MTN may have developed cold feet about the deal once RIL came into the picture.