This story appears in the October 2022 issue of Forbes Asia. Subscribe to Forbes Asia
This story is part of Forbes’ coverage of India’s Richest 2022. See the full list here.
The Mistry family that controls the privately held 157-year-old flagship Shapoorji Pallonji Group—and also has 18.4% in Tata Sons, the holding company of the 9.6 trillion rupees ($117 billion) revenue Tata group—faced a double tragedy this year. Patriarch Pallonji Mistry passed away in June at the age of 93, followed by the sudden death of his younger son Cyrus Mistry, 54, in a car accident in September.
The family’s $14.2 billion fortune—primarily derived from a minority stake in the sprawling Tata conglomerate—is now helmed by the patriarch’s older son and group chairman Shapoor Mistry. Before his death, Cyrus was working with his brother to pare down Shapoorji Pallonji Group’s debt that had ballooned to 234.8 billion rupees during the pandemic.
They offloaded stakes in key businesses like consumer durables firm Eureka Forbes and renewable energy business Sterling & Wilson Solar and repaid nearly 135 billion rupees of loans. These efforts paid off: the group swung into the black with a modest profit of 1.4 billion rupees for the year ended March 31, based on provisional results. It’s going forward, it says, with a robust order book worth 323.6 billion rupees spread across sectors, geographies and clients.
The late Cyrus, who had been appointed chairman of Tata Sons in 2012, was ousted in 2016 amid a public spat with Tata patriarch Ratan Tata. He spent his last years legally challenging the Tatas, but in March 2021, the Supreme Court ruled the dismissal was fair.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/anuraghunathan/2022/10/12/the-mistry-familys-double-tragedy-leaves-a-vacuum-at-the-shapoorji-pallonji-group/