No shortage of legal cases against Anil Ambani

 It’s hardly news that Anil Ambani has a major D6 gas pricing dispute against his brother Mukesh awaiting judgement in India’s Supreme Court. But PETROWATCH learns the younger son of legendary Indian industrialist the late Dhirubhai Ambani – and the world’s third richest Indian after brother Mukesh and steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal – has thousands of legal cases pending against him.

On January 14, Anil’s telecommunications company Reliance Infratel filed a Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP) with the Indian stock market regulator, Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), for its IPO. Seen by this report, the prospectus lists 1768 criminal, civil, taxation, consumer, anti-monopoly, labour and class action cases from across industry and the general public faced by Anil’s 11 telecommunications businesses. Most interesting are 17 criminal cases: four were filed by investors before the 2005 split of Reliance Industries, which Anil and Mukesh headed together before their acrimonious fallout.

Eight cases allege forgery and cheating by Anil’s Reliance Communications, and one ex-employee has even brought a case claiming his salary was ‘misappropriated’! Equally interesting are four election related cases, brought against Anil during his brief tenure as a Samajwadi (Socialist) Party MP in the Rajya Sabha (India’s upper house) from June 2004 to March 2006. Anil’s term as MP should have lasted till June 2010 but he quit early thanks to controversy over a perceived conflict of interest with his job at the Uttar Pradesh State Industrial Development Corporation, deemed an ‘office of profit’. To be fair, getting sued is an occupational hazard for the chairman and promoter of any company in India, given the convoluted legal system and the local propensity to take the slightest grievance to court. But Reliance’s stock market prospectus also reminds us that the group’s promoters and companies have themselves “from time to time initiated legal proceedings relating to their businesses and operations.”

Source: Petrowatch