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Reliance ownership row resolved
By agencies
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Saturday, 18 June 2005, 19:30 IST
MUMBAI: The ownership row in Reliance empire was resolved early on Saturday morning with Mukesh Ambani and his younger brother Anil reaching an agreement to divide the assets.
The elder brother Mukesh will take control of Reliance Industries and Indian Petrochemical Corp. Ltd. while younger sibling Anil will look after Reliance Infocomm, Reliance Energy and Reliance Capital, their mother said in a statement.
"I have today amicably resolved the issues between my two sons, Mukesh and Anil," the mother, Kokilaben, said on Saturday.
"I am confident that both Mukesh and Anil will resolutely uphold the values of their father and work towards protecting and enhancing value for over three million shareholders of the Reliance Group," she said.
The statement followed marathon discussions amongst the family and their advisors overnight, reports said.
It also came hours before a crucial board meeting of the $15 billion Reliance Industries to discuss how the group should be divided in order to settle the bitter ownership battle between the billionaire Ambani brothers,
The settlement brings down the curtains on a corporate soap opera which has transfixed the nation for seven months with its vitriolic charges and counter-charges of boardroom wrongdoing that have been splashed across newspapers.
Relations between the brothers began to sour after their father, Dhirubhai Ambani, who built the empire from scratch after starting as a gas pump attendant, died three years ago without leaving a will.
But the quarrel between Mukesh, known as publicity shy in contrast to Anil, a stylish media-savvy man wed to an ex-Bollywood star, only burst into the open last November.
The row has been closely followed because Reliance has India's biggest shareholder base. It has had an impressive line-up of mediators including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and K.V. Kamath, Chairman of Indias largest private sector bank ICICI Bank.