New Delhi: It seems that Walmart’s acquisition of homegrown online retail titan Flipkart may get embroiled in controversy as the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) on Wednesday said that it will move the appropriate authority and take legal recourse against the ecommerce deal. The traders’ body said its team of lawyers is studying the deal.“The deal is circumventing laws and will offend foreign direct investment (FDI) policy once it is implemented and will create an uneven level playing field beside accomplishing hidden agenda of Walmart to reach out to offline trade through e-commerce way,” the CAIT said in a statement.

Walmart is not an online company and ecommerce is not its core competence area. Therefore on the basis of money power a bigger game is designed to enter its goods to offline market through the way of online trade. The government should closely monitor each passage of the deal since it is not a merger of two companies but will have greater ramifications on retail trade and economy, CAIT president B C Bhartia and secretary general Praveen Khandelwal said in a press release.

The traders’ body said the deal also relates to certain crucial issues such as “FDI policy, data security, competition, unfair practices …” “The government should immediately frame a national policy for ecommerce and constitute a regulatory authority to regulate and ecommerce business in India and till such time, the deal should be put in abeyance,” Khandelwal said.Worth mentioning here is that Walmart acquired 77 per cent stake in Flipkart last week for about USD 16 billion (over Rs 1 lakh crore) in the country’s largest acquisition and the world’s biggest purchase of an ecommerce firm. Last year, a Morgan Stanley study mentioned that increasing internet and a boom in smartphone adoption, in addition to rapid economic growth, could make India’s bourgeoning e-commerce sector worth USD 200 billion by 2026.