How Mukesh Ambani Will Split His Reliance Empire to Avoid Dad, Dhirubhai Ambani's Folly; starts with Reliance Jio
Around this time 13 years ago, billionaire Mukesh Ambani and his younger brother, Anil, were living in the same Mumbai house with their mother while they were busy fighting each other in Indian courts over their father’s empire. Dhirubhai Ambani had died in 2002 without leaving a will — and, thus, the seeds of a fraternal feud.
As part of a 2005 family settlement, Mukesh had won control of deep-sea fields in the Bay of Bengal that had just started producing gas. But the agreement also required him to supply cheap feedstock at a fixed price for 17 years to Anil’s proposed power plant. Honoring that pact might have ended the eight-hour-long electrical outages in the capital New Delhi, but it would have crippled Mukesh’s Reliance Industries Ltd., India’s largest non-state-owned company.
Luckily for the older sibling, the Indian Supreme Court’s May 2010 verdict went in his favor: The gas was held to be Indian sovereign property, not Mukesh’s to give. Two weeks later, the brothers agreed to live in “harmony,” and end most of the non-compete clauses of their separation — including in the telecoms sector, where Anil ran Reliance Communications Ltd. On that basis, Mukesh Ambani re-entered the industry a month later, a move that would catapult him to his current standing as the world’s 10th richest tycoon with a net worth of $90 billion.
There’ve been a few more developments since. The gas discovery, the centerpiece of the feud, proved to be a damp squib. Several of Anil’s companies have gone bankrupt. It was symbolic, therefore, that when Mukesh Ambani this week put in motion his own succession plan — the 65-year-old isn’t repeating his father’s folly — he started with the telco.
Ambani’s first-born, Akash, 30, will succeed him as
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