Afternoon:
9°c
There is no Indian billionaire more elusive than Pallonji Shapoorji Mistry, known as the "Phantom of Bombay House" for his behind-the-scenes presence at the headquarters of Tata Group.
So it came as a slight surprise to go for a pint at the White Horse pub in Hascombe, the Surrey village where my parents live, and find out that Mistry had himself popped in for a pub supper a month or so back.
Mistry is worth at least $5 billion and holds an 18% stake in Tata Sons (Tata chairman Ratan Tata holds less than 1%), so he's a powerful figure. But for all his wealth, Mistry was so impressed by the meal that he hired the pub to cater for his 80th birthday. With the typical parsimony of the Parsi community, he paid just £60 a head for his 45 guests, many of whom flew in from India for the event.
A few days before I came in, the pub had shipped the dinner up to Mistry's house on the hill above the village, which unbeknown to us he's owned for years (although he's actually now an Irish citizen). The menu included Italian lamb roast, a salmon platter and honey- glazed ham. But, as if to hammer home just how entwined India now is with the UK, the pub chef who cooked up these rather un-Indian delicacies was actually Indian.
Indeed, he trained with the Taj, the Tata Group's hotel chain where Mistry's son Cyrus is a director.
* The Bombay High Court has come to the rescue of Anil Ambani, the youngest of the feuding billionaire Ambani brothers. Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man, was on Monday ordered to supply vast quantities of gas to his brother at just over half the government-set gas price, honouring an agreement made before the two split Reliance Industries in 2005 from which Mukesh has been struggling to escape from ever since. Compliance would cost Mukesh's Reliance Industries $1.8 million a day over 17 years, or about $11 billion in total. With that much at stake, you can be sure that at the end of the month the court has given the two to come to an agreement, there still won't be one.
* Patching up the Taj Mahal hotel after November's attacks appears to have given the Tatas a taste for restoration. Last week they bought the Sea Rock, the seafront hotel in the Bandra suburb favoured by Bollywood stars, which has lain derelict since it was hit in Mumbai's 1993 bomb blasts.
