Amazon joins list of foreign firms that got suckered

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Editor's note: Doing business in India is not for the faint of heart. And, for a foreign company, it’s that much tougher. In fact, over the years, a clear pattern seems to have emerged of foreign firms claiming to have been hard done by.  Take, for instance, when British telecoms company Vodafone Group Plc got hauled up by the government of India over non-payment of Rs 20,000 crore in retrospective taxes and penalties. Beyond the immediate uproar it seemed like a case of a vengeful institution out to extract some dollars. But there were some who believed there was merit in hanging the company out to dry. But then it happened again, when an Indian promoter family, the Singh brothers of pharma company Ranbaxy, suckered Daiichi, a Japanese firm, so hard that warning bells went off in corporate boardrooms across the world. Not to forget NTT Docomo, the Japanese telecoms company that came here arm-in-arm with Tata Teleservices Ltd, and left rather unceremoniously. One could go on and on. Remember Cairn Energy? Or South Korean steel major Posco? The earlier avatar of …