The Supreme Court has agreed to hear on March 9, in an open court, a batch of petitions filed by Cyrus Mistry seeking review of the apex court’s March 26, 2021 order. The order had upheld Mistry’s ouster as the chairman of Tata Sons in October 2016.

A three-judge bench comprising Chief Justice NV Ramana and justices AS Bopanna and V Ramasubramanian had considered the request for an open court hearing in chamber on February 15. The order was uploaded on Monday.

While the bench, in a 2-1 majority decision, allowed the request for a rare open court hearing, Justice Ramasubramanian dissented with the other two senior judges.

“…Applications seeking oral hearing of the review petitions are allowed. List the review petitions on March 9,” the CJI and Justice Bopanna said in their order.

However, Justice Ramasubramanian expressed his “inability to agree” with the majority order. “I have carefully gone through the review petitions and I do not find any valid ground to review the judgment. The grounds raised in the review petitions do not fall within the parameters of a review and hence the applications seeking oral hearing deserve to be dismissed,” he said in a separate dissenting order.

Review petitions are considered generally in chambers and it’s very rare that they are heard in open court.

The SC had last year on March 26 set aside the December 18, 2019 order of the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) that had restored Mistry as the chairman of Tata Sons.

Mistry was removed as chairman on October 24, 2016, and as a director from the holding company’s board on February 6, 2017, and subsequently from the boards of several group firms, triggering an unseemly public spat with the Tata Group. The apex court had ruled that the sacking of Mistry by the Tata Sons board did not constitute either oppression of minority shareholders or mismanagement.

It had also said that the Shapoorji Pallonji Group (Mistry’s family company), which holds an 18.3% stake in Tata Sons, and had cited a value of Rs 1.75 lakh crore of its shareholding, is free to thrash out an agreement on the valuation and terms of the stake sale with the Tata group.

Dismissing the NCLAT order which had reinstated Mistry, the bench, then led by Chief Justice SA Bobde (now retired), had observed, “it is an irony that the very same person (Mistry) who represents shareholders owning just 18.37% of the total paid up share capital and yet identified as the successor to the empire has chosen to accuse the very same Board, of conduct, oppressive and unfairly prejudicial to the interests of the minorities”.