Britain’s richest family the Hindujas is being torn apart by a Succession-style feud 

Family weddings don’t come more dazzling than the £15 million extravaganza that saw Srichand Hinduja and his brother Gopichand joined by about 16,000 close friends during February 2015.

The lavish affair celebrated the marriage of Gopichand’s 50-year-old son and heir, Sanjay, to a young fashion designer named Anu Mahtani. It lasted three days, and included performances by pop stars Jennifer Lopez and Nicole Scherzinger, plus a host of Bollywood stars.

Guests, whose 208 private jets reportedly left the parking area of Udaipur airport in India‘s Rajasthan province gridlocked, were transported to the five-star Jagmandir Island Palace hotel, setting of the Bond movie Octopussy, on a fleet of 14 specially decorated boats.

Celebrities, world leaders and India’s social and business elite spent their time devouring food from 16 countries, drinking cocktails at historic palaces and witnessing a plethora of fireworks displays and light shows. The dress code was ‘Indian classic’. 

It was a spectacular display of wealth by the patriarchs of Britain’s richest family, marking the culmination of a 45-year journey via which Srichand and Gopichand, along with their younger brothers Prakash and Ashok, had turned their late father’s trading company into a global conglomerate. It is today worth £28 billion and spans not just the subcontinent where they grew up but almost every corner of the world.

During this odyssey, the Hinduja brothers built everything together, operating as what PR men dubbed a sort of ‘Fab Four’ of the global business elite.

Presenting a united front to the world at large, often wearing matching suits and round glasses, they talked of achieving success via a unique Three Musketeers-style family code where ‘everything belongs to everyone and nothing belongs to anyone’. The brothers even shared ownership of various homes. 

Their 18th-century residence in London’s Carlton House Terrace, near Buckingham Palace, is made up of four interconnected six-storey buildings, boasts 30 bedrooms, and is worth upwards of £250 million.

Their egalitarian mantra, celebrated at this and other family events, had been inspired by the socio-economic model of ‘trusteeship’ which was endorsed by Mahatma Gandhi and dovetails neatly with the principles of their Vedic Hindu faith which emphasises good conduct and morality.

For years it was regarded as the central pillar in the success of a corporate empire that now operates in nearly 40 countries, employing almost 200,000 people.

Yet behind the scenes, that pillar has now crumbled. Indeed, even as the Hindujas posed for glamorous photos at the star-studded 2015 wedding, nasty cracks were starting to appear. 

While their wives were comparing saris, gold jewellery and elaborate henna tattoos, the brothers were in the early stages of a fierce dispute that would see the family’s dirtiest laundry aired in courtrooms across Europe.

This bitter legal row, spanning Switzerland, Jersey and the High Court in London has for years been kept secret by a small army of expensive lawyers. 

But explosive details became spectacularly public earlier this month via the publication of a court ruling in which a leading British judge raised serious concerns about the welfare of Srichand, who is now 86 and suffering from severe dementia.

Mr Justice Hayden revealed that a family scrap (likened to the battles in the TV series Succession within a warring media business family) over control of the Hinduja firms had so divided the clan that members were unable to agree where the elderly billionaire ought to be treated — or how his medical care should be financed.

This led to a grotesque situation where, despite what the judge aptly described as ‘the extraordinary scope and reach of their financial capacity,’ Srichand’s wealthy relatives had failed to make financial arrangements for their patriarch to be properly looked after in a private medical facility.

In August, the judge revealed, he’d therefore been ‘driven to consider’ placing one of Britain’s wealthiest men in an NHS nursing home.

The whole thing had seen the poor man’s health and welfare ‘marginalised,’ he ruled, saying that a ‘private residence with a full care package’ was now required for him to achieve ‘peace and dignity’ during the final chapter of his life.

However, Hayden added, ‘such a plan requires a financial settlement to be put in place to ensure the resilience of the care package’. That has not happened, and since ‘suitable accommodation and appropriate care’ has not been arranged, he is being ‘placed at a disadvantage by his own family members’ conduct’.

It’s an extraordinary, not to mention very sad state of affairs, suggesting that — behind the well-crafted image — the cash-soaked family, which socialises with royals, presidents and prime ministers, has become utterly dysfunctional.

To comprehend how this came to pass, we must wind the clock back to 2014, a year prior to Sanjay’s wedding. That was when the four Hinduja brothers, who were entering their 70s and getting various affairs in order, signed a joint letter setting out their aforementioned mantra: that ‘everything belongs to everyone and nothing belongs to anyone’.

At least three of the brothers — Gopichand, Prakash and Ashok — seem to have believed the pact set out core principles via which the business empire would be run, not only during the remainder of their lifetimes, but also by future generations. 

In practical terms, they took it to mean that any asset under the sole name of one brother would belong to all four, and that upon their deaths they would act as each other’s executors.

Disputes began to arise, however, when Srichand’s cognitive decline left him unable to continue effectively running some of the group’s companies, seemingly including its Swiss bank.

Believing that his brothers and their immediate heirs were taking steps to manage them instead, Srichand felt that his daughters, Vinoo and Shanu, and their children, were being unfairly sidelined.

Since — in the manner of mega-rich dynasties — almost all of the family’s fortune is held by trusts, rather than businesses, his side of the family also became concerned that they were being cut off financially.

Around 2015, Srichand had therefore tried to have the letter they had signed in 2014 set aside. After that failed, the increasingly ailing tycoon, who is known as ‘SP,’ in 2019 decided to ask the High Court in London to have the arrangement formally annulled.

This move kicked off a blizzard of litigation over control of various Hinduja companies worth billions of pounds between them, which has since been playing out, in virtual secrecy, in several jurisdictions.

Central to this epic falling-out is the fact that, unlike his three brothers, Srichand does not have a living male heir (his only son died in the 1990s).

Because he originally comes from a culture where this still matters — in India only men are traditionally groomed to take over family businesses — this seems to have left him concerned that all the significant parts of the family empire would be divided up between his five nephews, with his direct descendants frozen out.

Such fears appear, incidentally, to have been shared by Srichand’s grandson Karam Hinduja, an investment banker in his early 30s who is the oldest son of Shanu.

In since-deleted Twitter posts at the height of the falling-out last November, he declared: ‘The philosophy of SPs brothers is not so much ‘all for one and one for all,’ but rather ‘all for us, period.’ There is nothing joint about this family.’

Against this hostile backdrop, things escalated and in 2020 Gopichand, 82, challenged the legitimacy of a ‘lasting power of attorney’ that had been granted to Srichand’s wife Madhu and, later to their daughters, Vinoo and Shanu. It allowed them to make decisions about their frail father’s finances and welfare.

Gopichand alleged that the women were exercising undue influence over his ailing brother.

Over at least 20 hearings, the court gained intriguing insights into the machinations of the hitherto-secretive family.

At one point, Gopichand sang Hindi songs and fought tears while giving evidence, saying the four brothers were ‘one soul’ and suggesting that his estranged sibling’s dementia could be cured by resolving their dispute.

At another, in the spring of 2021, Vinoo and her sister Shanu both admitted that they had used their father’s funds for their own purposes and gave up guardianship.

It emerged that since 2013 as much as £20 million may have been spent from his personal funds, some of it used to pay their legal fees, and other amounts passed to grandchildren or used for ‘their own private purposes’.

Giving evidence, Vinoo said they had been left with no choice but to draw on Srichand’s loot due to a ‘financial squeeze’ that had come about because, she alleged, her side of the family had been deprived of cash since 2014 and cut off entirely from 2018.

The judge said the ‘conflict of interest’ was so ‘flagrant’ that both sisters had ‘disclaimed the role’. He added that he had appointed a solicitor to act as Srichand Hinduja’s ‘deputy for property and affairs’.

Around the same time, family members were also embroiled in a separate High Court row in London over family assets.

With this unresolved, Schrichand’s side — who, of course, maintained that they’d been cut off from family trusts — said they didn’t have resources to pay for the old man’s dementia care. Hence the squalid situation that forced a judge to consider placing him in an NHS nursing home.

This complex and very public dispute is out of character for a clan that has, for decades, mingled with the upper reaches of society while clinging to homespun philosophy such as ‘my duty is to work so that I may give’. With few able to work out how exactly their empire generates its riches — ‘The Hindujas flaunt their wealth but conceal its flow,’ U.S. business magazine Forbes once concluded — senior family members have styled themselves as private individuals who live modestly by comparison with their wealth.

‘They do not have fleets of yacht, cars and private jets,’ says a figure close to them. ‘They have not amassed fabulous collections of fine art and they do not have sprawling country estates with hot and cold running servants.’

The search for the Hinduja billions is actually a journey across continents. The trail begins more than a century ago in the Indus Valley of Sindh, a fertile coastal province now part of Pakistan but then an ancestral home for Indian merchants.

From Sindh, the brothers’ father Parmanand moved to Bombay in 1914 and began trading textiles, spices and dried fruit with Persia — modern Iran. After migrating to Tehran, the business expanded into fertilisers, cement, oils, metal and dubbed Bollywood films.

Soon the money was rolling in.

As oil-rich Iran prospered in the 1960s, the Hindujas cultivated close links with the Shah and were awarded a vast range of contracts, from providing pylons for the overhaul of the electricity industry to supplying, during one fashion craze, trilby hats.

Thanks to the vast sums of money they made during this period, the family diversified into investment banking, manufacturing and property. By the time Parmanand died in 1971, they had a virtual monopoly in brokering the sale of goods from India to Iran.

But their prosperity was dependent on the Shah and alerted by their network of informants, they liquidated many assets before his regime was overthrown in 1979. By then they were safely installed in London. 

In a rare interview, Srichand said he consulted politicians, economists and, extraordinarily, astrologers before making big decisions. ‘In this way I analyse every country where we have a large stake from the point of view of an outsider.’

Perhaps this foresight is why he cannily chose to sell family holdings in Beirut before it became a war zone.

The brothers were already wealthy through the deals they forged with the Shah but their elevation to the super rich was based on oil. In 1984 they bought a significant portion of the Saudi-owned Gulf Oil company before buying them out when the relationship soured.

A recent acquisition has been the Old War Office on Whitehall, once Winston Churchill’s office and where in the final scene of Skyfall, James Bond, played by Daniel Craig, stands alone looking out over the London skyline.

Humility in business and domesticity, however, was all. The brothers were said to subscribe to the Hindu tradition that held fame to be disgraceful.

‘Our inherited philosophy on success is: be silent, be generous, be modest,’ Srichand once said. ‘If you blow your own trumpet and move in glamorous circles the focus moves from your company to yourself. Focus is lost, concentration is undermined.’

History suggests they didn’t always follow this maxim, however: the brothers, who are vegetarians and teetotal, developed relationships with Lady Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, former presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton. Ex-Prime Minister Edward Heath was hired to lobby for them.

Royalty, too, was on the family shopping list. They were photographed with the Queen, Charles and Princess Diana. Rumours in India persist to this day that the Queen attended private Diwali celebrations in the family’s vast Carlton House Terrace mansion.

When three Hinduja sons wed in India, the then Prince of Wales sent a message wishing the couples ‘fruitful and prosperous’ marriages. Eight years ago four family members were at a lavish Buckingham Palace charity dinner where guests included a swathe of India’s richest men and women.

Yet their wealth and influence have not insulated them from tragedy or controversy.

In 1992 Srichand’s son Dharam killed himself in a family feud over an arranged marriage. The 22-year-old, who was educated at Westminster School, fell in love with an Anglo-Indian who was a Roman Catholic from Australia.

The family, who wanted him to marry a high-caste Indian woman, disapproved. When the young couple fled to Mauritius, having tied the knot at Chelsea Register Office, they put adverts in local newspapers suggesting he was a missing person.

Torn between his love for his bride and loyalty to the family, and seemingly hearing that they were to be tracked down and forcibly separated, Dharam and his wife made a suicide pact. After tying his wife to a bed and dousing them both in white spirit, he set himself alight. Mercifully, she managed to escape.

Terribly injured, Dharam was flown to London but his life could not be saved.

Almost a decade later, in 2001, the Hindujas became embroiled in a political row when Peter Mandelson was forced to resign from the New Labour government amid allegations he had helped secure a British passport for Srichand in return for a £1 million donation to the ‘spirit zone’ at the Millennium Dome — though a much-criticised official report later cleared him of wrongdoing.

Around the same time, the Hindujas were under investigation in India over their alleged links to a corruption scandal involving the supply of howitzers for the country’s armed forces dating back to the 1980s.

All along they maintained their innocence of any wrongdoing and the allegations were dismissed by a court in 2005.

From today’s perspective, these earlier difficulties pale into insignificance compared to the bitter family feud revealed in London’s High Court, which may very well lead to the break-up of the dynasty’s vast commercial empire.

One of the dozens of lawyers involved in various recent court cases likened the whole thing to the turmoil of Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel War And Peace, which ends with one of its major characters dying in tragic circumstances and two others getting married and living happily ever after.

Whether the Hinduja saga can be resolved in such a tidy fashion remains to be seen.