There’s something more than sick about the sibling rivalry between the brothers Mukesh and Anil Ambani, and the lengths they are ready to go.
The latest causus belli of the brothers is Anil’s proposed merger deal with a South African telephony company — MTN — which could result in a chain of mergers and acquisitions, capable of transforming Reliance Communications into one of the largest telecommunications multinational companies. Instead of admiring the enterprise and pluck of his younger brother, Mukesh has opposed the R Comm-MTN deal, and has warned MTN of legal action to block the deal.
Such petty nit-picking and perpetual jousting between his sons on whose education he spared no expense, must be turning Dhirubhai’s ashes in the family urn. Alas, poor Dhirubhai, I knew him well. In another avatar as editor of India’s first business magazine, in the late 1970s I wrote the first ever major story on Reliance Industries when it crossed the annual sales turnover milestone of Rs.100 crore. This started a friendship which alternated between love and hate (because not everything I wrote about Reliance was music to the great man’s ears). But now it can be disclosed that the late Dhirubhai played a sizeable role in the growth and evolution of Business India and Businessworld. In an era when obtaining information about corporate shareholdings and backroom deals was as difficult as extracting water out of stone, Dhirubhai was a generous source and rich mine of information.
Your editor acknowledges a deep debt owed to the late Dhirubhai Ambani, RIP. Wish his squabbling sons would do likewise.