 "Ajay Piramal, Venu Srinivasan join Tata Sons' board")
Ajay Piramal, Chairman of Piramal and Shriram groups, and Venu Srinivasan, Chairman of TVS Motor and Sundaram Clayton joined the board of Tata Sons Ltd, the holding company of the Tata group of companies, as non-executive directors effective today.
Billionaires Piramal, 61 and Srinivasan, 63, will join the high profile board, which has Ishaat Hussain, former CFO, Tata Sons, Vijay Singh, former Defence Secretary of India, Nitin Nohria, Dean of Harvard Business School, Ronen Sen, Former Indian Ambassador to USA and Farida Khambata, global strategist, Cartica as other directors. Cyrus Mistry is the chairman of the board.
When contacted, Srinivasan declined to comment on his appointment. Piramal was not immediately available for comment.
The appointment of two top Indian industrialists on the board of Tata Sons signifies the conglomerate’s move to bring in more experienced talent at the holding company level. The $103-billion revenue group is currently facing headwinds with few of its group companies like Tata Steel’s European operations which is selling its British operations and is in talks for a joint venture with Germany’s ThyssenKrupp for its rest of Europe operations.
The Tatas are also gearing up to invest in the defence business which has been identified as a core business for investment by Mistry. Both Tata and Piramal groups are also building financial services business separately and compete in the business.
Piramal, an alumnus of Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management, had sold his pharmaceutical business to Abbott in 2010 for $3.72 billion and since then is building a real estate empire apart from investing in the financial services business of the Chennai-based Shriram group. Piramal also invested in Vodafone India Limited and exited with a hefty profit in 2014.
Srinivasan, an alumnus of College of Engineering, Chennai and Purdue University, served as the President of the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) for the year 2009-10, President of the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) for the period 1999-2001, and Chairman of the National Safety Council, Government of India.