MUMBAI: Seems there is no end to breaking-news at the once-staid and media-shy Tata Trusts that owns and controls the $180-billion Tata empire that straddles from salt to software, airlines to highend automobiles and semiconductors. The latest headline is the “unanimous reappointment” of Venu Srinivasan as a trustee and a vice-chairman of these dozen-odd charities, for life--something the board of these trusts made mandatory after the death of the group patriarch Ratan Tata on October 9, 2024, if at least one of the trustees opposed the decision.
With Srinivasan's re-appointment, the focus now shifts to the re-appointment of Mehli Mistry, who is a cousin of Shapoor Mistry and his younger brother, the late Cyrus Mistry (Noel is married to their sister Aloo Mistry) and was picked up by the late Ratan Tata during the crisis at Tata Sons’ after Cyrus Mistry’s sacking in October 2016, as a trustee of the trusts which is vertically split now, as his term expires on October 28.
Mistry's re-appointment and continuation as a trustee for the lifetime tenure will require the unanimous approval of all the seven trustees. A source has confirmed the reappointment of Srinivasan but the trusts has not responded.
A meeting of the board of the trusts held under the chairmanship of Noel Tata on October 17, 2024 had resolved that if the tenure of a trustee expires, he/she has to be re-appointed by the trust concerned without any limit attached to tenure provided the decision is unanimous.
All the trustees serve the respective trust for life.The decision follows the reappointment of Noel Tata as a trustee and the chairman in January 2025, with no limits on his tenure, which is to say for life.“Renewal and fresh appointment is required to be unanimous according to past practice of the trusts.
Renewal, after which it will be for life, requires unanimous approval,” according to that board meeting, a source told TNIE. Similarly, the re-appointment is also automatic and applies to all trustees.The meeting had also said that if a trustee chooses to vote against the reappointment, she/he would be in breach of the commitment and would not be fit to serve the trusts by such conduct, the source added.
The same meeting had also said trusts would review its nominee directors on the board of Tata Sons on attaining 75 years. It was during this meeting that the charities chose to nominate Noel Tata to the Tata Sons board. Srinivasan and Vijay Singh who is 77, being other nominees. The tenure of the trustees also do not have an end, similar to past trustees like JRD Tata, Jamshed Bhabha, and RK Krishna Kumar and lastly Ratan Tata, who all held their positions until their passing.
But Noshir Soonawala, who was also a trustee for life, stepped down from the boards of the two trusts due to health and advancing age. There were also trustees with fixed tenures, typically three years, which have been periodically renewed. Ratan Tata had handpicked Srinivasan to join the trusts and also on the board of Tata Sons on November 17, 2016, weeks after a board room coup had ousted Cyrus Mistry as the chairman of Tata Sons on October 24, 2016.
The term of the 73-year-old Srinivasan, the chairman emeritus of the TVS Motor Company and auto components maker TVS Holdings, is ending on October 23, and in fact, the reappointment was not unexpected given his closeness to the chairman Noel Tata, who took over the reins of the trusts on October 11, 2024—primarily the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust and the Sir Ratan Tata Trust and each of them holding nearly half dozen associate trusts and collectively owning 52 percent of Tata Sons. These two and the other dozen plus smaller trusts collectively own 66.6 percent of the Tata Sons.
The second largest shareholder is the Shapoorji Pallonji group with 18.4% ownership in the holding company. What makes his Srinivasan’s reappointment crucial is the sharp division among the seven key trustees, which came out in the open at the September 11 board meeting when four of them led by Mehli Mistry, Pramit Jhaveri, Darius Khambata and the philanthropist and the chairman of the Jehangir hospital in Pune Jehangir HC Jehangir, opposed the reappointment of another trustee and vice-chairman Vijay Singh on the Tata Sons’ board despite chairman Noel and Srinivasan proposing. Following the forced voting in which he lost, the former defence secretary whose name was in the list of the Augusta Westland chopper scam accused, resigned from the board of Tata Sons, but continues to be on the board of the trusts.
What surprised everyone was that for decades, especially under the chairmanship of the late Ratan Tata, all the decisions of the trusts were unanimous and never contested, which the trusts say as the Tata way of doing things or functioning. But that ended with the passing of Ratan Tata. Mehli Mistry’s position as a trustee, though officially equal to others, has become politically weighty, especially as the dissenting bloc's informal leader.
Some insiders have described his bid to join the Tata Sons board as a coup while others see it as an overdue demand for institutional transparency. His term ends on October 28 which will gather more newsy moss given the open revolt that Noel is facing since last month, which even led to the Union home and finance ministers asking the trusts to settle the matter with a whatever-it-takes approach.
Srinivasan on the other hand, as the other vice-chairman and a veteran of the Tata ecosystem, is seen as an organisational stabiliser. As a long-time nominee director on the Tata Sons board, he has wielded considerable influence over key appointments and strategy discussions. Srinivasan’s support for Noel is described as both ideological as well as operational as he is seen determined to preserve the spirit of unanimity and the trustees’ collective discretion along with Noel.
On the other hand, Jhaveri, the longest serving head of Citi India from 2010-19, brings global banking and governance credentials. He is seeking a professionalised structures within the trusts, and had called for clear rotation norms, performance metrics and defined disclosure policies.
Khambata is a seasoned lawyer and a former advocate general of the state, brings the legal heft behind the dissenting camp's arguments, ensuring their positions are carefully articulated within the trusts' framework. Jehangir, the Pune quiet philanthropist with deep roots in Mumbai, adds moral heft and legitimacy to the bloc's push for transparency. Srinivasan is the grandson of the TVS Group founder T V Sundaram Iyengar, was also a non-official director on the Central Board of Reserve Bank of India in 2022. In the 2024 Forbes India ranking, the industrialist was the 55th richest person in the country with a net worth of $5.65 billion.
Under his stewardship, TVS Motor from the late 1980s scripted a turnaround, which was mired in labour troubles with striking workers, leading to mounting losses. Srinivasan shut the factory down for three months, forcing the unions to relent. He then upgraded plant machinery, invested in new technologies and implemented total quality management, a Japanese method of process-driven manufacturing. TVS re-entered the market by launching TVS Victor, which was the first indigenously built four-stroke motorcycle. The launches that followed set TVS Motor on the path to becoming the third-largest two-wheeler manufacturer.
