Coffee Day chief raises MindTree stake

After last month’s Rs 90-cr deal, buys another 2% of Soota’s holdings.

V G Siddhartha, founder-head of the Cafe Coffee Day group, on Tuesday raised his holding in MindTree, the Rs 1,500-crore information technology services company based here, by buying 822,676 shares divested by Ashok Soota, the latter’s former chairman and co-founder.

On Tuesday's transaction, Soota's holding in MindTree comes down to 3.54 per cent, while Siddhartha’s holdings through his group entities, Coffee Day Resorts and Global Technology Ventures, has risen to 14.58 per cent.

When Soota resigned from MindTree in March this year, he was the single largest shareholder there, with a holding of about 11 per cent. Last month, he sold half his holding (about 5.5 per cent) through a block deal for about Rs 90 crore to Coffee Day Resorts. That made Siddhartha — incidentally, his father-in-law is the Union external affairs minister — the single largest stakeholder in MindTree. on Tuesday, more so.

In an earlier interview to Business Standard, Soota had said the money raised through the stake sale would be used for his new venture, Happiest Minds, and a non-government organisation he wished to start.

Last week, MindTree announced an impressive growth for the first quarter ended June 30. The jump in net profit was 116 per cent to Rs 34.5 crore during the quarter, when compared with the corresponding period last year.

The shares of MindTree on the Bombay Stock Exchange touched a monthly high Rs 434.24 on Tuesday and closed at Rs 411.30, an increase of 3.4 per cent over the previous day's close.