Nice FT piece from yesterday:
Brotherly shoveBy Joe Leahy
Financial Times
Published: August 11 2009 20:40 | Last updated: August 11 2009 20:40
Murli Deora, India's oil minister, normally relaxes by playing bridge at the weekend with his wife and friends. But in recent weeks, a rather less genteel contest than that has been intruding on his free time.
Mr Deora was a close confidant of Dhirubhai Ambani, the rags-to-riches entrepreneur who built his Reliance polyester group into a corporate titan but died in 2002 without leaving a will. This sparked a succession war between his sons Anil and Mukesh, now Asia's richest siblings.
Dropping into Mr Deora's Mumbai home one weekend in June after his customary jog on the seafront, Anil Ambani complained to "uncle" about how he believed Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries was trying to corner the spoils of the KG Basin, a giant gas field discovered by the group off India’s east coast in 2000, says a person familiar with the matter.
Late last month, frustrated by suspicions that the minister was siding with his brother in the dispute, Anil Ambani went public. He used the podium of the annual meeting of one of his companies, Reliance Natural Resources, to lambast Mukesh’s Reliance Industries and the oil ministry.
The nationally televised onslaught--and the release of an earlier letter to Manmohan Singh, prime minister, that contained the same allegations--sent reverberations through the halls of power in New Delhi and has elevated the long-running Ambani succession war into an issue of national importance.
"Motivated by corporate greed, RIL [Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries] is dishonourably trying every trick in the book to get out of its binding commercial obligations," Anil alleged later in e-mailed answers to questions from the Financial Times. (Mukesh Ambani and Reliance Industries declined to comment for this article.) Not only is the row, which is being heard in the Supreme Court in New Delhi, threatening to disrupt sales from the KG Basin, India’s most important natural resource discovery in decades, but it has also raised questions about how business is done in the world's fastest-growing large economy after China.
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