Bengaluru and Mumbai: Last year’s clean chit given to Tata Sons group company secretary Suprakash Mukhopadhyay, an aide of chairman N. Chandrasekaran, has come under fresh scrutiny. A previously unreported email detailing his role in soliciting an investment for his family’s wealth-advisory business raises questions over whether the internal probe that cleared Mukhopadhyay was thorough enough and examined all relevant details.
Darius Khambata, who rejoined the Sir Ratan Tata Trust (SRTT) and the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust (SDTT) in November 2023—while the late chairman Ratan Tata was still in charge—had last year asked Trusts’ representatives on Tata Sons board to quiz Chandrasekaran about any possible breaches of the Tata Sons Code of Conduct.
“I think the Trust must ask the chairman of Tata Sons as to whether there has been any breach of the Tata Sons Code of Conduct and what action, if any, is proposed to be taken,” Khambata wrote in an email to Tata Trustees on 16 April 2025. “This is a matter for the board of Tata Sons and hence for the Trust nominee directors to raise after consultation with all the trustees,” he wrote.
Mint has reviewed Khambata’s email, shared by a Tata group executive.
This email to trustees, sent a day after Mint’s story came out last year, disclosed how Mukhopadhyay had used his position to get his elder daughter to present the wealth advisory firm to him.
, the paper had first reported that Tata Pension Management had listed Divinion Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd, a firm owned by Mukhopadhyay’s family, among 473 ‘Tata Group and sponsor’ companies in 2022, before removing the reference a year later. Tata Pension is backed by Tata Asset Management Ltd, where Mukhopadhyay is a director. Mint‘s story also showed that Mukhopadhyay had not disclosed this business to the group, and had sought help from many current and former group executives
What the email said
“I should disclose two things,” Khambata wrote in his email. “Mr Mukhopadhyay’s daughter, who is a lawyer, is my junior. She joined in September 2023 after graduating. In late 2022, his other daughter, who was working for this Fund, had approached me, through Mr Mukhopadhyay, to make a presentation about investment with the Fund.” He said he “quite impressed and made an investment”.
He added that he “was not aware” that the Fund was owned by Mukhopadhyay’s family. “I thought his daughter worked for the Fund. She did not at all suggest that the Fund was connected to the Tata Group.”
“So I suggest that Noel, Venu and Vijay find out from Chandra and then keep us informed,” wrote Khambata, referring to the then trusts representatives on the board of Tata Sons: Tata Trusts Chair Noel Tata, Venu Srinivasan and Vijay Singh.
To be sure, Khambata’s investment was made before he took over as trustee, and details of his email have not been reported until now. The email raises questions over how many current and former group executives had been solicited by Mukhopadhyay for his family’s wealth-advisory business ventures.
Fresh probe call
A Tata trustee said there is sufficient reason to start a new investigation now, including details of this email, and whether the internal committee of the group had reviewed them.
Legal experts have also called for a fresh independent investigation. “Darius Khambata did the right thing by flagging this, and asking the Trust’s nominees to ask the Tata Sons chair to investigate this,” said H.P. Ranina, a senior lawyer in the Supreme Court. “But the probe was done by employees of the Tata Group. Now that is a problem because it is like the judge and the prosecutor are the same.”
The lawyer said a fresh investigation is needed “right from the start, by independent people into this wealth advisory firm, so that all aspects—including all the current and former Tata Group employees whose money is managed by it—come out.”
Emails sent to Tata Sons and Mukhopadhyay seeking comment went unanswered. An email sent to Tata Trusts, which owns 65.9% of Tata Sons, also did not elicit a reply.
The Tata Code of Conduct says a conflict of interest for a group employee arises when an employee “is in a position to derive an improper benefit, personally or for any family member or for any person in a close personal relationship, by making or influencing decisions relating to any transaction.”
Not ‘intentional’?
Within a week of Mint‘s report, the group had set up a three-member committee comprising Nupur Mallick, head of Tata Sons human resources; Eruch N. Kapadia, a finance executive; and Sidharth Sharma, general counsel at the group, to probe the incident. Significantly, the panel did not contact Khambata, according to an executive familiar with the matter. Mint could not confirm whether Khambata’s email had been submitted to the panel.
, the internal panel pointed to Mukhopadhyay’s lapses but fell short of concluding he was guilty, and said his actions were “not intentional”, Mint reported on 29 April 2025.
“Prima facie, there are lapses on Mr Mukhopadhyay’s part in making adequate and timely disclosure to the competent authority in Tata Sons about (a) his involvement and relationship with the activities of Divinion, (b) him making, or facilitating, solicitations of any kind from former employees of Tata companies…and (c) any transactions between Divinion and any Tata group entity of which he is a director/Trustee,” concluded the three-member committee, Mint had reported.
“However, there does not appear to be any intentional breach of Tata Code of Conduct or mala fide intent on his part to make a personal gain by compromising the interests of his employer entity (Tata Sons) or of the relevant Tata Group entities named in the news reports,” the probe report concluded.
Speaking to Mint on Saturday, Khambata said: “I made payment for purchase of units of a fund floated/managed by Divinion Investment in late 2022, and from what I can ascertain these units appear to have been allotted on 1 January 2023.”
He said this happened more than 10 months before he was named a trustee of SDTT and SRTT in November 2023. “I made a disclosure of my investment to my fellow trustees on 16 April 2025, since the matter of Divinion was being discussed, again as a matter of abundant caution, although there was no conflict. When I became aware of Mr Mukhopadhyaya’s ownership, I applied to redeem these units, and this was done thereafter,” said Khambata.
At the end of March 2024, Mukhopadhyay’s wife Paromita, together with her two daughters owned 33.34%, while each of the sisters, together with the other sister and mother, owned 33.3%, according to Divinion’s filings with the corporate affairs ministry.
Divinion’s senior leadership comprises former Tata Group executives, including chief executive Hormuz Bulsara; former chief operating officer of Tata Asset Management; director S. Mahalingam; and former chief financial officer of Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), and CFO Adil Burjor Busha, a former director with Tata Pension Management.
Mukhopadhyay joined the Tata Group in 1988, got a three-year extension in March 2024, when he turned 60, and will retire in March next year. Chandrasekaran, who took over as chairman in February 2017, first picked him from TCS to join him at the group’s holding company in April 2017.