THE LISTING QUESTION

THE TATA-MISTRY RELATIONSHIP HITS FRESH TURBULENCE AS THE SP GROUP'S PUSH TO LIST TATA SONS COLLIDES WITH THE TRUSTS' RESOLVE TO STAY PRIVATE.

- BY KRISHNA GOPALAN

A little after 6 p.m. on October 10, as Mumbai wound down for the weekend, a rare communiqué arrived in newsroom inboxes. Shapoorji Pallonji Mistry, the reticent head of one of India's oldest business houses, had broken his silence.

The two-page statement, signed personally by Mistry, was calm in tone but seismic in implication. It called once again for “transparency and good governance through the public listing of Tata Sons”—the holding company at the centre of India’s largest conglomerate. For the 160-year-old Shapoorji Pallonji (SP) Group, the second-largest shareholder in Tata Sons with an 18.4% stake, the demand was not new. But the timing was telling.

Earlier that same day, the board of Tata Trusts, which owns about two-thirds of Tata Sons, had met at the iconic Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai. The meeting was held just two days after the first anniversary of Ratan Tata’s death and days after Trusts Chairman Noel Tata and Tata Sons Chairman N. Chandrasekaran met Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in New Delhi.

The meetings did little to clear the air amid murmurs of disquiet within the Trusts. “It was business as usual,” says one insider, adding “nothing hinted at the brewing storm.”

But as Mistry’s statement showed, the storm had already arrived—in the form of a renewed public demand to list Tata Sons, and by extension, shine a light on the governance of India’s most influential corporate structure.

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

At the core of this renewed confrontation lies a simple, strategic question: should Tata Sons—the unlisted holding company that controls India’s largest industrial empire—remain private, or is it time to subject it to financial sector regulations?