Four trustees of the Tata
charities that control the group have accused two fellow
trustees of breaking with their long-held opposition to listing
Tata Sons, two sources familiar with a letter sent on Monday
said, deepening a dispute at the top of the $277-billion Tata
empire.
Tata Sons, the holding company of 26 publicly listed Tata
Group companies, is at the centre of a dispute with Tata Trusts,
which owns 66 per cent of the company.
In the letter to trustees Venu Srinivasan and Vijay Singh,
Noel Tata, his son Neville Tata, senior lawyer Darius Khambata
and longtime Tata executive Bhaskar Bhat said exploring ways to
keep Tata Sons unlisted was consistent with positions previously
approved by the seven charitable trusts that control the
company, the sources, who read out contents of the letter to
Reuters, said.
The letter was dated October 5, they added. The sources
declined to be named as the contents of the letter are not
public.
Srinivasan and Singh did not immediately respond to text
messages seeking comment. A spokesperson for Tata Trusts did not
respond to an email seeking comments.
The authors of the letter have argued the issue of keeping
Tata Sons unlisted had been debated and endorsed on multiple
occasions and said a recent proposal to restructure Tata Sons
was being considered after India’s central bank rejected the
conglomerate’s request for an exemption from rules that would
require it to list, the two sources said.
“They also said that trust was not interfering in the
affairs of Sons and only voicing opinions on company’s listing
as controlling shareholders,” one of the two sources said.
Reuters reported last week that fault lines had emerged
among trustees over proposals that could allow Tata Sons to
avoid a stock market listing, while separate complaints have
also raised broader governance concerns within the trusts.
Published on October 6, 2026
