How Mukesh Ambani will divide his business empire to avoid dad’s folly

Around this time 13 years ago, billionaire Mukesh Ambani and his younger brother, Anil, were living in the same Mumbai house with their mother while they were busy fighting each other in Indian courts over their father’s empire. Dhirubhai Ambani had died in 2002 without leaving a will — and, thus, the seeds of a fraternal feud.

As part of a 2005 family settlement, Mukesh had won control of deep-sea fields in the Bay of Bengal that had just started producing gas. But the agreement also required him to supply cheap feedstock at a fixed price for 17 years to Anil’s proposed power plant. Honoring that pact might have ended the eight-hour-long electrical outages in the capital New Delhi, but it would have crippled Mukesh’s Reliance Industries Ltd., India’s largest non-state-owned company.