Do you think there is enough ground for a review petition by the Cyrus Mistry camp against the Supreme Court order?
They can file a review petition. Nobody can stop them from doing that but I do not see any solution being found from filing the review petition for the simple reason that a review petition can only be filed and accepted by the Supreme Court if there is a fundamental error of law involved in the Supreme Court judgement.
I do not think that this particular judgement has any fundamental error of law. They have decided on the facts of the case. So a review petition will be just thrown out. They can waste their time doing that and spend money on their lawyers. But I do not think the review petition will succeed. In any case, the review petition has to be decided by the same bench and the present chief justice is retiring on the 23rd of April. So the review petition if at all filed will have to be decided before the 23rd of April, before the honourable chief justice retires next month. Unless and until you can point out a very fundamental error of law, the review petition will be thrown out and will not be accepted.
The Cyrus Mistry camp had been talking about a three-member mediation panel, which the Tata camp did not seem to warm up to. Now the Supreme Court has left the issue wide open as far as valuation goes. Do the Tatas seem interested in providing an exit at all?
I think the Mistry camp will do well to just accept with a little bit of variation of the values which have been reached because I am told that the Tatas also got very good independent persons to value the shares and if their valuation is more or less in line with market, then it should be accepted. No purpose will be served in going on and on in this.
If the Shapoorji Pallonji Group wants to make a clean exit, they should just accept the valuation with a little bit of variation instead of fighting this matter for another five to seven years. Our courts are not competent to go into accounting valuation. These are not in the purview of the chartered accountants. They themselves give different values. Valuation is an art, not a science and that being so, the values cannot be arrived at unless the two parties agree. If the Shapoorji Pallonji Group wants to exit Tata Group, they should move out as early as possible and accept a reasonable valuation which has been arrived at by good independent accountants.
