Local traders seek probe into Cloudtail link with Amazon

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The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), which has been seeking action against Amazon, has now written to union minister Piyush Goyal asking for an investigation against Cloudtail India over its links with the US retail and tech giant.</p>
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Cloudtail India is one of the largest sellers on Amazon offering a host of products across categories like electronics, media, apparel, furniture, footwear, appliances among other things.</p>
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The online retailer is a joint venture between Amazon Asia and Prione Business, which is a company owned by Catamaran Ventures, the family investment office of Infosys co-founder Narayan Murthy.</p>
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"In this context, we reiterate that not only Amazon, its joint ventures in India too are hand in glove and knowingly helping it desecrating our country's rule of law. It is also deeply worrying that some banks are colluding with Amazon by helping it keep prices lower than the market through exclusive policies giving cashback," CAIT said.</p>
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The traders’ body said that Cloudtail and its holding company, Prione Business Services has hired former Amazon employees as its senior executives including for the post of managing director, CFOs. CAIT has claimed that this reveals the clandestine manner of operations on Amazon.</p>
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“Even the majority of board members of Cloudtail are former employees of Amazon,” the CAIT letter noted.</p>
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CAIT has also raised objections over various schemes provided by various banks, which regularly offer discounts and cash-back facilities on purchases made on e-commerce sites such as Amazon and Flipkart.</p>
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