Ex-Dragon’s book promises inside track on Tata row
SERIAL entrepreneur and a former star of RTE’s Dragons’ Den Peter Casey is set to publish a book in the new year that lifts the lid on the epic boardroom clash that engulfed one of the world’s biggest companies.
Casey, the author of a previous book on Tata — the largest private conglomerate in India and one of the largest in the world — had started work on a follow-up book when a corporate crisis engulfed the €100bn firm last year, leading to the ousting of its then chairman Cyrus Mistry.
Mistry is a son of Irish citizen Pallonjii Mistry (88), who became an Irish citizen in 2003 and is regularly listed as Ireland’s richest man.
Casey’s 350-page book will include a chapter that will provide the first “insiders’ account” of the events that led to a bitter public clash between two of India’s most famous business families, the Tatas and the Mistrys.
Casey was granted exclusive access to Ratan Tata, widely considered the Tata group’s patriarch, while researching the book.
Ratan led the company for 21 years until 2012 and came out of retirement to serve as interim chairman after Cyrus Mistry’s departure.
Casey said the book will “put the record straight” about what really happened at Tata, when it ousted its former chairman Cyrus Mistry in October 2016.
Casey’s book is based on many hours of interviews with Ratan Tata, as well as “never before seen” company documents, internal memos and company archive material.
Keepers of the Flame is a follow-up to his 2014 best-selling book The Greatest Company in the World?: The Story of Tata.
It traces the history of eight generations who built the company into one of the world’s largest firms.