Renowned lawyer, former Additional Solicitor General of India and Maharashtra Advocate General, Darius Khambata has stepped down as trustee of the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust.
Khambata stepped down on 25 October, a day after Tata Sons’ Chairman Cyrus Mistry was sacked. BloombergQuint confirmed the news with his office.
Mistry was dismissed by the Tata Sons’ board in a meeting on 24 October. The Tata Sons statement to the media did not detail the reasons for his dismissal and said that the board had appointed Ratan Tata as interim chairman, and a search committee had been constituted to select the next chairman.
The next day, Mistry wrote a letter to Tata Sons board members and trustees of the Tata Trusts, including Khambata, expressing his shock at the events in the board meeting and presenting a defence of his work as chairman.
It was not publicly known then that Khambata had resigned from his position as trustee. Since Mistry’s email letter was addressed to him as well, it is likely that Mistry didn’t know of his resignation at the time.
Why Did He Resign?
Khambata cited increasing professional commitments as the reason for his resignation.
He was one of six trustees of the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust not including Chairman Ratan Tata, according to information available on the Tata Trusts’ website.
There are eight other trusts listed on the website and all of them share one common trustee R Venkataramanan. Former Tata Sons director RK Krishna Kumar is a trustee with five Tata Trusts. Bain Capital’s Amit Chandra is a trustee of Jamsetji Tata Trust and was recently appointed as a nominee director on the Tata Sons board.
Besides serving as trustee, Khambata has a long history of having provided legal counsel to Tata Sons, during the times of both Ratan Tata and Cyrus Mistry as chairmen. Much sought after in international arbitration matters, Khambata also appeared for Tata Sons in the Docomo case in the London Court of International Arbitration, and more recently in the Delhi High Court.
Mediator?
Interestingly Khambata is also listed as a trustee of the MC Chagla Memorial Trust, in his speaker biography at a recent IIT Bombay event.
MC Chagla was the first permanent Indian chief justice of the Bombay High Court and served from 1948 - 1958. His son and veteran jurist Iqbal Chagla is the father-in-law of Cyrus Mistry. BloombergQuint was not able to confirm Khambata’s current position at the MC Chagla Memorial Trust.
Khambata’s office denied media reports that he was asked to mediate between Ratan Tata and Cyrus Mistry.
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