Background

• Vivek Soni is a Partner with EY India’s Mergers and Acquisitions team and Leader of the Private Equity practice.
• Vivek is based in Mumbai and is responsible for leading the firm’s initiatives across the private equity sector.
• He has over 2 decades of consulting and deal advisory experience across diverse sectors and market segments across Indian and international markets.
• Vivek is part of a rare group of professionals who bring together a depth of experience across sell-side advisory, buy-side PE investing and on-ground operational experience of leading and scaling up a PE-backed services business in India.
• He has an MBA from London Business School and is a Chartered Accountant from ICAI, India.

Skills

• Vivek’s 24+ years of experience encompasses private equity investing, investment banking, restructuring and turnaround, business development, debt financing, equity raising, new products development and structured finance.

Professional Experience

• At EY, Vivek handles the firms relationships with several, large PE fund clients and leads a cross functional team tasked with coverage of our PE fund clients and their portfolio companies.
• He is also engaged in several important M&A deals and advises clients on PE fund raises / divestures in Real Estate, Consumer Goods, Hospitality and Business Services sectors.
• Recently he has advised an US investor on US$85mln dollar sale of mid-market hotel chain to a large, listed Indian hospitality player.
• Prior to joining EY, Vivek was with KPMG for over 18 months, where he led it’s private equity channel.
• Before KPMG, Vivek was Operating Partner at Berggruen Holdings India, fund manager for a US headquartered PE fund styled family office with over $3.5bln AUM and ~$200mln invested in India. Spending over six years in this role, Vivek successfully pivoted a small Infrastructure Services start-up facing financial and operating stress into a category leading platform, growing it 4x in size. In this role, besides looking after traditional CFO functions like finance and accounting, risk management and investor relations, Vivek actively led from the front on all aspects related to strategy, new business development, sales and marketing.

His other previous experience includes:

• Real-estate private equity with Lehman Brothers in Mumbai – Vivek was a senior investment professional in the team where he identified and evaluated several investment opportunities in commercial and residential real-estate spaces. Post Lehman’s bankruptcy in Sept 2008, he focused on asset management of Lehman’s USD$300 million strong India RE portfolio.
• Real-estate structured finance with Lehman Brothers in London- Vivek was involved in the underwriting, structuring and syndication of CMBS bond issues for real-estate PE funds.
• Structured finance for infrastructure assets at Bank of America in London – Vivek focused on underwriting, structuring and evaluation of whole business securitization transactions backed by infrastructure assets like airports, toll roads, ports, wind farms and a power generation and distribution business.
• 8+ years of due diligence and audit experience with EY and Arthur Andersen in India – Vivek focused on the oil and gas and telecom sectors, where he was involved in several marquee transactions and complex USGAAP/IAS audit engagements of large clients like IOC, Bharti Enterprises and BALCO.