The three children of billionaire Mukesh Ambani were approved by shareholders to join the board of Reliance Industries Ltd., initiating a succession plan at the most valuable firm in India.
According to a business stock market filing, Anant, 28, whose nomination had been contested by proxy advisory companies due to his young age, managed to get 92.7% of the votes for a board position, while twins Akash and Isha, 32, received more than 98 percent of the vote.
At the August annual shareholders’ meeting, firm chairman Mukesh Ambani, 66, declared that his three children, Akash, Isha, and Anant, would be admitted to Reliance’s board of directors (BoD).
In addition, he had declared that he would serve as the company’s chairman and CEO for a further five years, focusing on developing and enabling its “next-gen” leaders.
Following that, Reliance requested approval from shareholders by postal vote for their nomination to the company’s board of directors. Reliance released the results of the shareholder vote on Friday.
According to the filing, Isha received 98.21% of the vote in support of her nomination and 1.78 percent against. 98.05 percent of voters supported Akash, while 1.94 percent were against. 92.75 percent of voters supported Anant’s appointment, while 41.58 crore, or 7.24%, voted against it.
A global proxy advice company called Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. has advised shareholders to vote against the plan to put Anant, Ambani’s youngest son, on the board of the family-owned Reliance.
Given Anant’s inexperience, the proxy consulting company had advocated for a vote against him.
Similar to ISS, Institutional Investor Advisory Services, or IIAS, of Mumbai said that the young Ambani scion’s appointment “does not align with our voting guidelines” since he is under 28 years old.
IIAS backed the resolutions aiming to elect Akash and Isha. Another foreign proxy business, Glass Lewis, supported Anant’s nomination.
Ambani, who was appointed to the Reliance board in 1977 at the age of 20, had to handle a savage rivalry between his brothers when his father passed away in 2002 without leaving a will. The board selections are a part of his succession planning.
As chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm, the telecom and digital part of the company, Akash has been employed there since 2014. Isha, an executive director of Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd., is in charge of the company’s retail business growth. In recent years, both have made presentations to shareholders at the flagship’s annual shareholder meeting.
Anant is reportedly spearheading the growth of the materials and energy industries, particularly in the green energy space.
The firm had previously said in a resolution asking for shareholder approval for the scions’ appointment to its board that they would only be paid a fee for attending board and committee meetings.
Ambani, 66, has not received a salary from the firm since the 2020–21 fiscal year, although other executive directors, such as his cousins Nikhil and Hital, get compensation in the form of commission, benefits, and perks.
All that his three children, the twins Akash and Isha and Anant, will get is a percentage on the company’s profits and a sitting fee.
The three appointments are made under the identical conditions as Ambani’s wife Nita’s 2014 appointment to the business board. In the fiscal year 2022–2023 (April 2022 to March 2023), she received a commission of Rs. 2 crore and a sitting fee of Rs. 6 lakh.
Reliance operates in five main verticals: telecom and digital, retail (both physical and online), new energy, oil-to-chemical (O2C), which includes the biggest single-location refining complex and petrochemical facilities in the world, and newly announced financial services.
