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Gopichand, Prakash and Ashok were defending the validity of a letter signed in 2014 by the four brothers stating that assets held by one belong to all. That’s when a London judgment shed light on the conflict in the family. With a collective net worth of about $15 billion, the four brothers always presented a united front, with little to suggest that not all was well in the House of Hinduja. citizens, are among the wealthiest men in Britain. In London, they are Queen Elizabeth’s neighbors, sharing Carlton House Terrace - four interconnected Georgian houses down the street from Buckingham Palace - where they hold their annual star-studded Diwali bash. The group’s heady rise let them rub shoulders with the likes of former U.S. “It’s most unlikely to go back to the socialistic philosophy of everything for everybody.”įounded by their father Parmanand Deepchand Hinduja in 1914 in the Sindh region of British India, the one-time commodities-trading firm was rapidly diversified by the brothers, with early success coming from distributing Bollywood films outside India. “They seem to have reached a point of no return,” said Kavil Ramachandran, a family-business expert at the Indian School of Business. With dozens of companies - including six publicly traded entities in India - the closely held Hinduja Group employs more than 150,000 people in 38 countries in truck-making, banking, chemicals, power, media and healthcare. The increasingly bitter feud has raised the possibility of a messy unraveling of the 107-year-old group, putting at risk one of the world’s largest conglomerates. Photographer: Stefan Wermuth/BloombergĪs clashes pile up in courts in London and Switzerland and the SP side suggests misogyny may be driving actions against his daughters, there may be no going back. SP’s three brothers, Gopichand, Prakash and Ashok want the group to stick to its age-old motto that “everything belongs to everyone and nothing belongs to anyone.” Karam’s side of the family is effectively asking for what was once unthinkable - the group’s assets to be broken up. His grandfather, SP as the 85-year-old is known, now suffers from a form of dementia, and Karam, his sister, mother, aunt and grandmother are locked in a battle with the rest of the Hinduja family over pieces of the $18 billion British-Indian group. And unlike most of the tearjerkers they watched, this one may not have a happy ending. Little did he know then that a quarter century later the two of them would be embroiled in a real-life family drama more gripping than any Bollywood plot. “He and I, without fail, once a week, whatever was new, whether it was good or bad,” Karam said in a recent interview in Geneva. As a child in London, one of Karam Hinduja’s favorite pastimes was watching Bollywood movies with his grandfather Srichand Hinduja, the patriarch of a sprawling global business empire.