Crucial Indian Hotels Company Ltd board meeting today

NEW DELHI: A critical board meeting of the Indian Hotels Company Ltd ( IHCL) to be held on Friday could hold the key to the future course of events concerning ousted Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry and the Tata Group.

The IHCL board is meeting on Friday to consider the September quarter results and Mistry will chair the meeting.

He is still the chairman of key listed group companies such as IHCL, TCS and Tata Motors. HDFC chairman Deepak Parekh, industrialist Nadir Godrej, former HUL MD KB Dadiseth and ex McKinsey executive Ireena Vittal are the independent directors on the IHCL board.

In a no holds barred letter to Tata Sons directors after his ouster, Mistry had singled out IHCL and pointed to the company's 'flawed international strategy' and how many foreign properties of IHCL and holdings in Orient Hotels had been sold at a loss.

"The onerous terms of the lease for Pierre in New York are such that it would make it a challenge to exit," Mistry had stated and had added that moves like acquiring Searock hotel at a highly inflated price led IHCL to write down its entire networth over the past three years, and impaired the company's ability to pay dividends.

Speculation had been rife that Mistry's exit could lead to IHCL's MD and CEO Rakesh Sarna quitting the company but IHCL and Tata Sons had issued a joint statement calling reports on Sarna's exit completely unfounded and baseless.

In a response to BSE which had sought clarifications from the company on a Bloomberg report titled- 'Ousted Tata chief says group faces $ 18 billion in write-downs,' the company had said its financial statements are prepared on a going concern basis and present a fair and true view of the state of affairs of the company NS Rajan, former group chief human resources officer, and an ex member of the now defunct GEC Council resigned from the IHCL board as non executive director on October 28.

IHCL's standalone net loss widened for the quarter ended June 30, 2016 to Rs 9 crore from a net loss of Rs 4.81 crore in the same period last fiscal.