TCS ousts Mistry from board Exports, tourism fight to recover one month after NZ quake
MUMBAI, Dec 14, (AFP): India’s Tata has ousted Cyrus Mistry as a director of its cash cow IT business Tata Consultancy Services as the Indian conglomerate steps up its purge of its former chairman.
TCS said in a statement late on Tuesday that shareholders had voted overwhelmingly at an extraordinary general meeting in India’s commercial Mumbai to dump Mistry from its board.
In the statement to the National Stock Exchange of India it said that Mistry is “hereby removed from the office of Director of the Company with effect from the date of this meeting”.
Mistry was unceremoniously sacked in October as chairman of Tata Sons, the holding company of India’s most famous family conglomerate -- the $103 billion steel-to-salt Tata Group.
The shock move saw company patriarch Ratan Tata reassert his authority over the sprawling group.
Tata Sons has called for its operating companies to hold EGMs to oust Mistry from their various boards. TCS was the latest, and biggest, to do so.
Tata Industries removed Mistry as director on Monday. Other group companies including Indian Hotels Co Ltd, Tata Steel, Tata Motors, and Tata Chemicals are scheduled to hold EGM’s in the next week to decide Mistry’s fate. WELLINGTON, Dec 14, (RTRS): Parts of New Zealand’s key export industries and its vital tourism sector are battling to get back on track a month after a deadly earthquake rocked the nation, crippling roads and slowing shipping.
At one of the country’s main ports in Wellington, ‘no-entry’ signs dot parts of the site hit by liquefaction, cracking or buckling, hampering shipments of items like meat and farm produce to destinations including China and Australia.
While 150 km away in the resort town of Kaikoura, often touted as the nation’s whale-watching capital, restaurants and hotels lie nearly empty as the roads that once carried in busloads of tourists through steep mountains remain closed.
Wellington’s port and Kaikoura are at the forefront of fallout from the Nov. 14 quake, which New Zealand’s central bank has initially estimated will cost the NZ $250 billion ($180 billion) economy up to NZ $8 billion.
“We are important to the regional economy, so it is important to resume (full) operations soon,” said Derek Nind, CEO of Centre Port Wellington, the port in the country’s capital which lies about 480 km from the epicentre of magnitude-7.8 temblor that killed two people.
“We need to think how we build resilience into our ports. I am trying to get world experts to help us on that.”
Nind added that the port, which handled trade worth NZ $3.3 billion in 2015, was unlikely to run at full throttle until April, although it did manage to partially resume some operations in the days after the quake.
Major problems at the site include container shipping and cold storage that remain out of bounds, while Nind’s own office is also in a no-go zone.
Nind said it was not yet possible to assess how much business would be lost due to the quake.
One sign of progress comes as the port says its key log shipping operations are “back to normal” in December after they were hit the month before.
That is good news for companies that rely on the port as one of the main shipping points for New Zealand’s rapidly growing forestry industry, its third-largest export earner behind dairy and meat.
“November will probably be our weakest month on calendar, although things have started to flow back now,” said Steve Wilton, CEO of Masterton-based Forest Enterprises Ltd, the nation’s No.1 Forestry investment firm.