Downfall of a big-spending TYCOON
A scion of the Mittal steel dynasty, he spent £50 million on his daughter’s wedding. But now Pramod Mittal is facing bankruptcy – and his billionaire brother won’t step in to help . . .
THE bride was resplendent in her traditional red and gold wedding sari, ablaze with countless diamonds in her headpiece, earrings and nose ring.
The groom cut no less magnificent a figure, arriving astride a white horse, wearing a lavishly embroidered jacket with a white plume bobbing from his red turban.
Father of the bride, Pramod Mittal, 64, was bursting with paternal pride. For the marriage of his daughter Shristi in 2013 to Dutchborn investment banker Gulraj Behl was not only a spectacle in itself, it was also one up on Pramod’s older brother Lakshmi. Actually, about ten million up.
A scion of the ultra-rich Mittal steel dynasty, Pramod had spent £50m on Shristi’s wedding.
Lakshmi, 70, had spent around £40m on his daughter Vanisha’s wedding at the Palace of Versailles in 2004, with Australian popstrel Kylie Minogue giving a private performance.
WHO knows whether Lakshmi was stung by sibling rivalry? But when Judge Catherine Burton served a bankruptcy order against Pramod over a debt of £139,786,656.43 – plus interest – in the Insolvency and Companies Court in London last month, he conspicuously declined to come to his younger brother’s rescue.
And as if that phenomenal debt were not enough, Pramod is also entangled in a probe into organised crime in the formerly wartorn Balkan state of Bosnia. He was arrested last year and released on bail of ¤1m.
Despite the enormous sums involved, Lakshmi could easily afford to bail out his younger brother. His Luxembourg-based Arcelor Mittal steel business is valued at just over £9bn on the stock market, making his holding worth more than £3bn.
He also owns a 20pc stake in Queens Park Rangers football club and has an estimated £6.8bn hoard, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List.
In the past, he has put his hands in his capacious pockets to help out Pramod. And sources close to Lakshmi deny that the brothers are estranged. One said: ‘If there was any disagreement, it was a long time ago when Lakshmi set out [in business] on his own. But any tensions back then have been smoothed over long ago.
‘Lakshmi is the most successful member of the family and he has provided considerable financial support to them for years. He feels for his brother but thinks on this occasion that he should not step in and his brother should sort this out himself.’
Be that as it may, the sordid business of bankruptcy and Bosnian scandal were far from anyone’s mind six years ago at Shristi’s wedding extravaganza in Barcelona.
Pramod chose to stage the event there because of his love for the famous Catalan modernist architect, Antoni Gaudi.
The celebrations, which stretched over three days in early December, began with a welcome dinner in Barcelona’s maritime museum.
On the second day, the 500 guests – who were reported to have been asked to sign confidentiality agreements – were treated to a water and light display at the Magic Fountain in the Montjuic district, accompanied by the theme tune to Chariots Of Fire and an equestrian show with Andalusian and Arabian horses. The ceremony itself took place in the Oval Hall of the National Museum of Catalan Art, which houses works by Titian and the great Spanish painter Velazquez.
The menu was presided over by double-Michelin starred Catalan chef Sergi Arola, who trained with Ferran Adria of the legendary El Bulli restaurant.
The six- tier wedding cake weighed more than 9 stone.
Pramod had already played host to one overblown wedding, for his elder daughter Vartika. She was married in a lavish ceremony at the Ciragan Palace in Istanbul in another three-day affair in 2011, described as being grander than Prince William’s wedding to Kate Middleton the same year.
The Mittal family fortunes stem from the steel empire founded by their father Mohan in India in the 1950s. Most of Lakshmi’s vast wealth, though, is self-made. He began to branch out on his own in the 1970s and 1980s, with a strategy of buying up underperforming steelworks, often stateowned, and turning them around. In 2006, after a series of mergers, ArcelorMittal was formed, making him the biggest steel baron in the world. He now has 191,000 employees and major operations in 18 countries, producing almost 90m tonnes of steel. Lakshmi settled in London in 1995, buying up several houses on Kensington Palace Gardens, known as ‘Billionaires’ Boulevard’. Pramod, whose London mansion is a couple of miles away on the other side of Hyde Park, has had a rather more chequered business career. As Lakshmi branched out, P ramod and another younger brother, Vinod, ran parts of the family empire including a company called Global Steel Holdings. The roots of Pramod’s current humiliation date back 14 years, when he agreed to act as a guarantor for the debts of a metallurgical coke producer in Bosnia known as GIKIL, a partnership between his Isle of Man-registered Global Steel Holdings and the Bosnian state. In a deal that would prove to be devastating, he and Global Steel Holdings signed an agreement to guarantee GIKIL’s debts.
GIKIL subsequently failed to make repayments to a steel trading firm in London.
That debt was then pursued by a company named Moorgate Industries, which obtained the bankruptcy order.
To make matters worse, Pramod was in July last year arrested and interrogated by Bosnian prosecutors on suspicion of involvement in organised crime, economic crimes and abuse of power.
He was released on bail but investigations continue.
As for the bankruptcy case, Pramod’s lawyer, Richard Viegas of Collyer Bristow, said his firm had been instructed to file an appeal.
PRAMOD declined to respond to a request made through his lawyer for comment on his arrest in Bosnia and the allegations of involvement in organised crime.
He also declined to comment on whether he had approached his brother Lakshmi to settle the dispute with Moorgate and whether the two brothers are estranged.
‘Mr Mittal does not wish to comment on matters relating to his family, but considers the suggestions made baseless,’ his lawyer said.
Lakshmi Mittal has previously supported his brother very generously.
As recently as last year he paid off most of a £235m debt to an Indian state company.
This time, however, he seems to have washed his hands of his heavily-indebted sibling.