The Mistry family has been one of the leading business families in India for years, their business ventures, and feud with Tata have long been the centre of attention and the eventual accident of Cyrus Mistry stirred up many controversies about the ties of both the families on a professional and personal level. The Tata-Mistry tie goes back to the time of Pallonji Mistry, a business tycoon and father of four including Cyrus Mistry. He served as the Chairman of the Shapoorji Pallonji Group and was a major shareholder of the Tata Group.
Who was Pallonji Mistry?
On June 1, 1929, Pallonji Mistry was born in Bombay, now Mumbai, in a Parsi community. The Mistry family owns Shapoorji Pallonji, a significant construction firm. The State Bank of India, Reserve Bank of India, Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, Grindlays Bank, and Standard Chartered Bank buildings were all constructed by Shapoorji, the group patriarch and father of Pallonji.
His father began purchasing shares in Tata Sons in the 1930s, and as of 2011, that stake stood at 18.4%, as per Outlook Business, making Mistry the company’s largest individual shareholder and the largest individual shareholder in Tata Group, which is primarily owned by the charitable Tata Trusts.
Pallonji, a businessman who oversaw the 156-year-old engineering and construction behemoth Shapoorji Pallonji Group. Shapoorji Pallonji Construction Limited, Forbes Textiles, and Eureka Forbes Limited were all controlled by Pallonji Mistry, who served as the group’s Chairman.
When Tata-Mistry locked horns
The billionaire’s estimated fortune was locked up in a court dispute with the Tata Group, the biggest corporation in India. Mistry was frequently referred to as the Phantom of Bombay House, which served as the headquarters for the Tata Group. When Cyrus, his younger son, was chosen to succeed company patriarch Ratan Tata as head of the Tata company in 2012, the normally media-averse Mistry family made headlines. However, his tenure came to an end in a dispute following a boardroom takeover in 2016 spearheaded by Tata Trusts, which set off one of India’s biggest business confrontations. As a result, the two families, who had been working together for 70 years, engaged in a protracted legal dispute.
The two families have been at odds ever since Cyrus Mistry, the elder son of Mistry, was fired from his position as chairman of Tata Sons in October 2016. The Mistrys made the decision to sell their stake in Tata Sons in September 2020, stating that “a separation of interests would best serve all stakeholder groups,” as per Forbes.
Pallonji gave up his Indian citizenship in 2003 to get Irish citizenship, and according to various sources, this decision was taken on the basis of his marriage to an Irish-born national, Pat “Patsy” Perin Dubash. This made Pallonji the richest man in Ireland at the time of his death, as per an Outlook report. He continued to live in Mumbai. The family’s passion for horses may have contributed to their interest in Ireland; the Mistrys had a 10,000-square-foot house and a 200-acre farm in Pune, India, as per The Indian Express report.
Palace for Sultan of Oman
The Mistry family ruled the construction business in India and overseas and one of their major project was building the palace for the Sultan of Oman in 1976.
The Phantom of Bombay House, quite a reclusive businessman passed away in June 2022 at age 93. At the time of his death, he had a net worth of $15 billion as per Forbes and was one of the wealthiest men in the country.
