MUMBAI: The Tata Trusts board met on Friday at a time when differences over governance and transparency among its members have surfaced in the public domain. All the trustees except Darius Khambata attended the meeting held at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in south Mumbai. While chairman Noel Tata and trustees Venu Srinivasan, Mehli Mistry and Pramit Jhaveri were physically present at the meeting, other members – Vijay Singh and Jehangir Jehangir – participated virtually.Usually, the board meeting is held at the Trusts’ office in World Trade Centre in south Mumbai, but this time, the venue was changed. The board discussed and gave in-principle approvals to philanthropic projects of over Rs 1,100 crore. These included tribal upliftment projects, establishing a Rs 700-crore diabetes research centre near Delhi, and specialty hospitals in Maharashtra. The six-hour meeting went smoothly, said sources privy to the development, adding that there was no discussion on any matter relating to Tata Sons.
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Friday’s meeting comes after some trustees sought the Centre’s intervention to broker peace among opposing groups and break a governance impasse. Disagreements reportedly started soon after Noel Tata became the Trusts’ chairman in Oct 2024. Matters escalated at the Sept board meeting when majority of trustees opposed Trusts vice-chairman Vijay Singh’s reappointment to Tata Sons board. The trustees not on the board of Tata Sons have alleged that the Trusts’ nominee directors on Tata Sons have not been providing them complete updates especially on matters falling under Article 121, restricting their ability to make informed decisions. Currently, the two nominee directors on the Tata Sons board are Noel Tata and Venu Srinivasan. Both had opposed Singh’s ouster as a Trusts nominee as well as a proposal to appoint Mehli Mistry to the board of Tata Sons at the Sept meeting. According to the minutes of the Sept board meeting, Mehli had requested Singh to be present at the meeting where agenda items included the review of nominee directors of Tata Sons over the age of 75 years. Singh had indicated he did not want to be present when his directorship was coming for review. Khambata, according to the minutes, had underscored that the review had nothing to do with Singh but was related to the “existential issues confronting the Tata Group”. He noted that “This was a critical time for the Tata Group given the concerns related to listing and the efforts required to be made in that regard.”
