Home Business Pallonji Mistry, head of Shapoorji Pallonji Group, dies at 93

Pallonji Mistry, head of Shapoorji Pallonji Group, dies at 93

Mumbai: Pallonji Mistry, the Indian-born billionaire whose engineering empire built luxury hotels, stadiums, palaces and factories across Asia and whose family’s epic showdown with the Tata Group sparked India’s biggest corporate feud, has passed away in Mumbai. He was 93.

Mistry and his family control the Shapoorji Pallonji Group, which started more than 150 years ago and today employs more than 50,000 people in over 50 countries, according to its website. Its landmark projects include the Reserve Bank of India and the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai and the blue-and-gold Al Alam palace for the Sultan of Oman.

Mistry accumulated a net worth of almost $29 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him one of the richest men in India and in Europe. He surrendered his Indian nationality and became an Irish citizen in 2003 through his long marriage to Dublin-born Patsy Perin Dubash.

Most of the family wealth, however, derived from being the largest minority shareholder — 18.5% as of early 2022 — in Mumbai-based Tata Sons Pvt., the main investment holding company for India’s largest conglomerate.

That stake proved to be a double-edged sword for the media-shy Mistry when the shock ouster of his son Cyrus as Tata Sons chairman in 2016 triggered a very public, years-long courtroom and boardroom battle between two of India’s most-storied corporate clans.

The country’s top court ruled in 2021 that Cyrus’s ouster was legal and also upheld Tata Sons’ rules on minority shareholder rights, which made it difficult to sell shares without board approval. That meant the stake, worth almost $30 billion in early 2022, was basically illiquid.

The family business was founded in 1865, when Pallonji Mistry’s grandfather started a construction business with an Englishman. The initial project was the first reservoir in Mumbai, then known as Bombay. The company began doing business with the Tata family in the 1920s; both families are Zoroastrians whose ancestors fled Persia to India to escape religious persecution.

India’s news outlets called Mistry “the Phantom of Bombay House,” the Tata group’s head office, because he was rarely seen there and because of his quiet demeanor and avoidance of the media. The family is generally secretive and even such details as when he and his wife married are not publicly known.

In addition to his two sons Mistry had two daughters, Laila and Aloo. The latter married Noel Tata, the half-brother of Ratan Tata, who was named chairman emeritus of Tata Sons.

Image courtesy of (Outlook)