MUMBAI: Ending months of drama ensuing from the tussle for control at the highest echelons of the Tata Group, shareholders of the holding company, Tata Sons, voted to boot erstwhile chairman Cyrus Mistry out of the board on Monday. A majority of Tata Sons’ shareholders voted to prise away Mistry’s directorship, ending the tussle at least on the corporate front. The legal battles, however, still loom large.
“The shareholders of Tata Sons Ltd, at the extraordinary general meeting held today, passed, with the requisite majority, a resolution to remove Cyrus P Mistry as a Director of Tata Sons Ltd,” a statement released by Tata Sons said. Just days earlier, Mistry’s efforts to stall the decision, viewed as a foregone conclusion by observers, yielded no fruit. The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) dismissed petitions by two investment firms, backed by the Mistry family, against allowing the Tata Sons extraordinary general meeting to be held on Monday.
The Mistry faction had only moved the NCLAT because the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) had itself refused to grant any relief on that count. The removal of Mistry from the board of Tata Sons completes the campaign to wrest him of all posts he had held in the boards of the Tata Group.
Mistry and his group still hold 18.5 per cent of Tata Sons, but according to corporate law experts, shareholdings only bestow eligibility for directorship on the board and do not protect the shareholder from being removed as “long as due process is followed”.