The tussle atop the Tata group continues, with Tata Trusts doubling down on their opposition to N Chandrasekaran’s reappointment as Executive Chairman of Tata Sons.
Noel Tata-led Tata Trusts put out a damning public statement challenging the legal validity of the reappointment, declaring the board’s Sep 17 resolution "void ab initio"—legally invalid from the outset.
Tata Sons’ Articles of Association (AoA) have now become the talking point. At the board meeting, Tata Sons directors voted 4–1 to grant Chandrasekaran a second five-year term. Tata Trusts Chairman Noel Tata—one of the two Trust-nominated directors on the board—voted against the extension, while the other nominee, Venu Srinivasan, supported it. Then Tata Trusts put out a public release, maintaining that the AoA explicitly mandated the affirmative support of a majority of Trust-nominated directors for key decisions.
"Majority amongst two is two and not one," the Trusts doubled down. Their argument was that the statutory condition failed without unanimous support from both nominees, rendering the overall 4–1 vote irrelevant.
The Trusts also rejected arguments that Noel Tata’s opposition created a deadlock that could be cleared using a chairman’s casting vote. Casting votes apply only to overall board ties, not internal nominee divisions, Tata Trusts reasoned.
Another point that the Noel Tata-led trust argued was how Tata Sons aggressively defended these exact protective rights under Articles 104B and 121 before the Supreme Court during the Cyrus Mistry litigation, and that it now cannot disown the constitutional protections it previously fought to preserve before the apex court.
Tata Trusts have been vocally against plans to list Tata Sons to comply with Reserve Bank of India norms, repeatedly dismissing claims that listing was required to improve corporate governance. They even stated: "Pulling apart a hundred-year-old structure to fill an imaginary gap is taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut."
