Noel, Chandra meet Shah, Sitharaman amid rising tension at Tata Trusts

The government has stepped in to settle the escalating conflict within Tata Trusts, which holds 66 per cent in Tata Sons, the holding company of the salt-to-semiconductor conglomerate. Top representatives of Tata Sons and Tata Trusts met Home Minister Amit Shah and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in New Delhi on Tuesday evening to discuss attempts by a group of Tata trustees to “control” Tata Sons and behave like a “super board”. This comes ahead of a Tata Trusts board meeting on October 10 and amid expectation of a direction from the Reserve Bank of India on whether Tata Sons must go for a public listing — a contentious issue in the group.

It is learnt that the government decided to intervene and called an urgent meeting to help resolve a crisis at the leading business house of the country and deliberate on “misgovernance’’ at Tata Trusts, a philanthropic body. Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran, Tata Trusts Chairman Noel Tata, Tata Sons nominee director and Tata Trusts Vice-Chairman Venu Srinivasan, and senior lawyer and trustee at Tata Trusts Darius Khambata had the meeting with the Union ministers at Shah’s residence.

While the cracks within Tata Trusts had surfaced soon after Ratan Tata passed away in October 2024, it has been a fully divided house more recently with four trustees of Dorabji Tata Trust (a key shareholding trust) on one side and three on the other.

The latest crisis was triggered by the ouster of Trusts nominee director Vijay Singh from the board of Tata Sons through a vote among trustees, citing a retirement age of 75 years. Singh, a former defence secretary, is also vice-chairman of Tata Trusts.

Sources said that Mehli Mistry, a trustee at Tata Trusts and the driving force behind Singh’s ouster, was also planning to remove Srinivasan from the Tata Sons board. Mistry (who has ties with the extended family of Shapoorji Pallonji) aspires to be on the Tata Sons board, it is learnt. However, the resolution to appoint Mistry as Tata Trusts’ nominee on the Tata Sons board was defeated recently.

Mistry, a long-time associate of Ratan Tata and who’s backed by three other trustees--Pramit Jhaveri, Darius Khambata and Jehangir HC Jehangir-- against Tata Trusts chairman and the two vice-chairmen, has also been demanding the agenda and minutes of Tata Sons board meetings for vetting, sources said. The series of action by the Mistry camp is being seen as a ‘’coup bid’’ by those close to the developments.

The Tata group has been in the midst of one of the biggest corporate battles after Cyrus Mistry, a scion of the Shapoorji Pallonji group, was removed as Tata Sons chairman by Ratan Tata ahead of a board meeting in 2016, exactly nine years ago.

At this point, the government is keen to defuse tensions at Tata Trusts, given the Tata Group’s systemic importance to India’s economy and its sizable borrowings from state-owned banks, sources said.