Cyrus Mistry, ex-chairman of Tata Sons, dies in road accident near Mumbai

Untimely demise of Cyrus Mistry shocking; he was promising business leader who believed in India's economic prowess, tweets PM Modi

Former Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry was on Sunday killed in a road accident after his car hit a divider in Maharashtra's Palghar district neighbouring Mumbai, a senior police officer said.

He was 54.

Mistry was travelling from Ahmedabad to Mumbai in a Mercedes car, he said.

“The accident took place around 3.15 pm, when Mistry was travelling to Mumbai from Ahmedabad. The accident took place on a bridge over the Surya river. It seems an accident,” said Palghar district superintendent of police, Balasaheb Patil. An external spokesman for the Mistry family’s Shapoorji Pallonji Group confirmed news of Mistry’s death.

The other two persons travelling with him, including the car driver, were injured. All the injured persons have been shifted to a hospital in Gujarat, he said.

More details will be obtained from them, the SP added.

A Kasa police station officer said the accident occurred at Charoti Naka on the Surya river bridge under the Kasa police station limits.

The body of Mistry has been shifted to the Kasa Rural Hospital for postmortem.

The news is the latest blow for the Mistry family whose patriarch, Pallonji Mistry -- Cyrus’s father -- died in June at the age of 93. Their empire built luxury hotels, stadiums, palaces and factories across Asia, but was most recently known for a corporate feud with the Tata Group.

Pallonji Mistry had accumulated a net worth of almost $29 billion at the time of his death, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him one of the richest men in India. Most of the family wealth, however, derived from being the largest minority shareholder -- 18.5% as of early 2022 -- in Mumbai-based Tata Sons Pvt., the main investment holding company for India’s largest conglomerate.

Cyrus Mistry was named chairman of Tata Sons in 2012. His shock ouster in 2016 triggered a very public, years-long courtroom and boardroom battle between two of India’s most storied corporate clans, the Mistrys and Tatas. Mistry, who was born in 1968, studied civil engineering from Imperial College, London and then acquired a master's degree in management from London Business School.

Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that Cyrus’s ouster was legal and also upheld Tata Sons’s rules on minority shareholder rights, which made it difficult to sell shares without board approval. That meant the stake, worth almost $30 billion in early 2022, was basically illiquid. Mistry is survived by his wife Rohiqa and their two sons.