Rumours of Sheikh Mo/Ambani etc etc - the one thing Broughton said I have absolute confidence in is to disregard all the names that are going to be bandied about because any serious bidder will want to keep it quiet.
Well, after this week's court ruling, Mukesh should have a few more billions to spend.
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May 7, 2010
Ambani family quarrel ends in $17bn court rulingRhys Blakely in Mumbai Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, claimed victory in an epic $17 billion legal battle over his estranged brother Anil yesterday after winning a crucial verdict over the country’s largest gas find. The Supreme Court ruled that Mukesh’s Reliance Industries will not have to honour an agreement that would have forced it to sell gas to Reliance Natural Resources (RNR), a power company owned by Anil, at an estimated $5.4billion loss.
Mukesh stands to profit by $11.5 billion from the giant D6 block of the Krishna-Godavari basin after being given the go-ahead to sell its gas at a higher price set by the Government. The ruling is a massive blow to RNR. Anil admitted last year that the disputed gas supply contract was the “company’s primary asset and contributes most of its value”. Its shares slumped by a quarter yesterday in Mumbai, wiping £400 million off its value. The court battle had been at the heart of one of the business world’s most intense feuds. The Ambani brothers, worth more than $30 billion between them, are notorious for their mutual animosity. Such is their wealth and influence that together they account for more than 5 per cent of India’s annual GDP, and some fear that the bad blood between them poses a risk to the country’s stability.
They fell out after the death in 2002 of their father, Dhirubhai Ambani, who left no will after rising from rags to riches by creating Reliance, an empire of petrochemicals and telecoms. For years the brothers have shared the same Mumbai apartment building, but they are said to use separate lifts to avoid each other. In 2005, the group was split between the feuding siblings under terms hammered out by their mother, Kokilaben, the only person who has had any measure of success in mediating between them. Since then the relationship has been peppered by tit-for-tat legal actions. In 2008 the elder Mukesh, 52, looked to block a potential £35 billion deal that would have allowed Anil, 50, to create a new colossus in the global mobile telephone industry.
Months later, a furious Anil sued Mukesh for more than $1 billion for alleged defamation in an American newspaper. Their biggest disagreement by far, however, had been over vast gas deposits discovered off the east coast of India after Reliance, which was unified at the time, snapped up the exploration rights of the D6 block of the Krishna-Godavari basin in 1999.
Under the corporate split terms brokered by their mother, Mukesh’s Reliance Industries, agreed to supply gas to Anil’s RNR at a fixed price of $2.34 per million British thermal units (MBtu) for 17 years. In 2006 Mukesh claimed that the deal needed the approval of the Indian Government, which set a higher price of $4.20 per MBtu, putting into motion an epic legal battle.
Yesterday the court, which had earlier lamented the brothers’ failure to settle their differences man to man, ruled that because the gas belongs to the Indian people, the Government is able to set prices. It asked the brothers to renegotiate the deal accordingly.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article7119440.ece