Best of the Week: The Tata fight spills over
Tata's boardroom drama over the week, Flipkart may let employees cash out early, and cricket's new money hierarchy.
It was quite a week at Tata Sons HQ. The simmering battle between Tata Trusts and the Tata Sons board spilt into the charity regulator’s office, while questions around governance and a proposed restructuring added new layers to the dispute.
Tata Trusts chairman Noel Tata and his son Neville filed 36 caveats with Maharashtra’s charity commissioner after trustee Venu Srinivasan complained about the management of the trusts. The caveats seek to ensure the trusts are heard before any adverse order is passed.
The stakes are high. Seven Tata trusts collectively control 65.9% of Tata Sons, and their votes could be crucial at the company’s next shareholder meeting, where N. Chandrasekaran’s reappointment as chairman will come up. Srinivasan has also sought restrictions on Noel’s participation in decisions involving the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust.
A separate governance question involves Hanno One Warehousing, a company owned by Chandrasekaran’s wife Lalitha and son Pranav. Hanno is pursuing a ₹330 crore industrial park in Karnataka to serve TVS Motor and its suppliers. It already has a ₹106.3 crore warehouse project near TVS’s Hosur plant.
Neither Chandrasekaran nor Srinivasan informed the Tata Sons board about the business relationship, according to the story. The transactions do not qualify as related-party transactions under Indian law because Chandrasekaran is not a TVS director. But the lack of disclosure has prompted questions over the Tata Code of Conduct and potential conflicts of interest.
The connection has attracted attention because Srinivasan, TVS Motor’s chairman emeritus, voted in favour of Chandrasekaran’s third term at Tata Sons. That appointment was opposed by Noel Tata.
And then, Tata Trusts proposed a way to reshape Tata Sons itself. It wants Tata Consulting Engineers and Tata Electronics Systems Solutions merged into the holding company.
The two businesses are wholly owned by the Tata group and together generate substantial operating revenue. TESS, which assembles iPhones in India, reported ₹67,542 crore in revenue and ₹1,025 crore profit in FY26. TCE reported ₹1,932 crore revenue and ₹226 crore profit.
The proposal could push about 64% of Tata Sons’ revenue towards operating businesses, potentially taking it outside RBI’s NBFC framework. That could address one of the issues surrounding Tata Sons’ potential listing.
But the restructuring could itself face scrutiny over whether avoiding an NBFC classification or a listing is the primary motivation. If approved by the Tata Sons board and RBI, the merger could take 12-18 months.
So, in just one week, the Tata Sons dispute acquired three new battlegrounds: the charity regulator, corporate governance and the very structure of the holding company. And with the trusts holding the decisive voting block, the next Tata Sons shareholder meeting could be where those strands converge.
On to the best of Mint's work from this week:
Incoming Air India CEO Tewolde Gebremariam’s viral photograph aboard a rival IndiGo flight offered an awkward snapshot of Tata’s aviation challenge. Air India and Air India Express together lost ₹22,238 crore in FY26, with AIX contributing ₹6,767 crore despite revenue rising to ₹19,088 crore. AIX is now central to Tata’s expansion, with 105 aircraft and plans for more. But its liabilities exceed assets, while its borrowing limit has risen to ₹20,000 crore. Gebremariam does not run AIX day-to-day, yet the two airlines share several commercial functions.
The Mistrys’ 18.37% Tata Sons stake, long a valuable but illiquid family asset, is under pressure. In September, the SP Group offered to sell 3% to Tata Sons for ₹25,000 crore, but the board rejected it and backed a listing. The move comes as debt piles up: the group raised ₹15,100 crore in three-year zero-coupon bonds at 18.95%, plus $650 million at 14.5%. Its flagship company is rated BBB-, while group debt estimates reach ₹60,000 crore. After years of selling assets, the Tata Sons stake remains a crucial source of potential liquidity.
AI’s chip boom is starting to pinch Indian consumers. Memory-chip import values surged 314% year-on-year in June, far outpacing the 60% rise in volumes, signalling steep price increases. Globally known as “chipflation”, the squeeze is driven by AI data centres absorbing high-performance memory supplies, pushing up costs for conventional chips. In India, pen drives and external hard disks saw inflation jump to 16.8% in August from 3.9% in January, while mobile handsets moved from deflation to 3.5% inflation. The impact on overall inflation remains limited, however, as information and communication products carry only a 3.61% CPI weight.
India’s logistics and urban mobility sector is building a bigger IPO pipeline, with Mahindra Last Mile Mobility exploring a $200 million listing, Porter preparing for a potential $300-500 million offering and Rapido expected to begin listing procedures. None has appointed bankers or made a final decision. The interest comes alongside strong private funding, with MLMML raising ₹322 crore in July and Rapido securing $240 million in May. The sector is benefiting from rising consumption, e-commerce, urbanization and EV adoption. Recent listings of Ather Energy, Shadowfax, Ola Electric and Delhivery have also strengthened investor participation, although experts expect public-market funding to remain selective.
Starting 1 April, carmakers get a three-year grace period to self-certify a dozen fuel-saving technologies under India's new CAFE-III norms, which demand a 16% fuel efficiency improvement over five years. The catch is that some of these technologies, like start-stop systems and regenerative braking, are already nearly a decade old, raising questions about whether this truly rewards innovation or just old tech wearing new clothes. Industry players are cheering the flexibility, calling it a "technology-neutral" approach. But experts warn of possible double-counting if mandatory features earn extra incentives.
With Flipkart's IPO plans stuck in limbo, employees are growing restless, and the company might respond with a fresh Esop cash-out window letting eligible staff sell 20-25% of their vested holdings early next year. At least 10-12 senior employees have already left this year, many lured by better-paying cash jobs elsewhere. Can a one-time liquidity round really stem that tide? Walmart insists an IPO “remains an active part” of the roadmap, but gives no timeline. Meanwhile, rivals like Meesho have already listed, letting their employees cash in. Is Flipkart's wait becoming too costly to retain its best talent?
With Maharashtra and Karnataka declaring drought across most of their talukas, loan waiver fears are back on the table, and PSU banks, with far greater agricultural exposure than private lenders, look more vulnerable on paper. But history shows governments have typically compensated banks for waivers, limiting the real financial hit. So why worry at all? The actual threat may lie elsewhere entirely, in bond portfolios. As yields climb, PSU banks like SBI face mounting treasury losses, a far bigger swing factor in their earnings than loan waivers ever were.
Three months after retiring from international cricket, Ben Stokes is back in the headlines, this time for chasing T20 paychecks across Australia, Pakistan and the US. But England's cricket board might stand in his way, worried about setting a precedent for others to follow. Behind this one player's dilemma lies a much bigger story. Money is reshaping cricket's power structure. The BCCI's IPL dwarfs every other league in revenue and player pay, while boards in Australia, England and South Africa scramble to privatize and compete. Could this growing financial gap eventually force even India's biggest stars to demand more freedom?