Fight for the Empire

Hamish McDonald’s awesome book, Ambani & Sons, talks at length about the tussle between Mukesh and Anil over the Reliance empire. Reliance always had a twisted maze of “holding companies” behind which the ownership of the flagship, Reliance Industries, was hidden. The reasons for this were many, including (1) Tax saving, and (2) Having options to make, er, certain kinds of moves.

 

The second reason, well, you can imagine what kinds of moves it would have enabled. It also allowed Dhirubhai to use those companies to ensure that the Reliance share price didn’t fall at times when traders were trying to hammer it down. Keeping the share price from falling also helped small investors...

 

But what has that got to do with the fight between the brothers? Aha, at one point, Dhirubhai had “asked Mukesh to reconfigure the entire network”. While he was at it, someone put an idea in Mukesh’s head:

“What if the new configuration could be effected to his advantage? What if he could control the empire? What if he could build a new matrix that his younger brother, Anil, could never understand and, hence, could never break up the group?”

The web had more than 350 shell companies! The seeds had been sown…

 

After Dhirubhai passed away, the two brothers would sometimes make announcements without consulting the other. Resentment started to grow on both sides. In June, 2004, Anil became a Rajya Sabha member with the support of the Samajwadi Party in UP:

“Mukesh was incandescent with anger at Anil’s jump into politics with an opposition party.”

Shortly thereafter, Mukesh sneaked in an annexure in a board meeting that declared himself the boss.

 

It turned out Dhirubhai had died intestate, i.e., without a will. Which left the question open: who now owned the 34% controlling stake in the corporate web? The tussle got increasingly bitter. Both sides would leak embarrassing information, and questionable actions of the other side to the media. But clearly Mukesh had the upper hand, and Anil knew it. So Anil played the emotional card:

“He was repeatedly and loudly surrendering the decision on what should be done (to their mother). Mukesh might have all the biggest cards in his hand, but could he resist the mother’s moral authority?”

 

Undoubtedly, there was naked power play on both sides. It is also almost certainly true that Anil was right when he accused the chamchas (sycophants), chelas (devotees) and cronies of “encouraging (Mukesh’s) estrangement from Anil to further their own influence”.

 

Human nature doesn’t change: the same basic emotions (greed, power, influence, perceived sense of right and wrong) have always been the drivers of conflicts…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more