Srichand Hinduja, co-chairman and patriarch of a sprawling global business empire that produced one of the world’s largest family fortunes, has died. He was 87.
His death was reported by the Press Trust of India, which cited a family spokesperson. The report said he died in London. Hinduja had suffered from a form of dementia.
Known as S.P., Hinduja was the eldest of four brothers in control of Mumbai-based Hinduja Group, a closely held industrial conglomerate that as of 2021 employed more than 1,50,000 people in 38 countries in truck-making, banking, chemicals, power, media and health care.
He entered the family business when he was still a teenager. By that time, his father, Parmanand Deepchand Hinduja, had made a fortune as a merchant, importing carpets, dried fruits and saffron from Iran and exporting goods such as textiles and tea.
Hinduja helped to expand his family’s holdings. The conglomerate acquired truck-maker Ashok Leyland Ltd and Gulf Oil International during the 1980s, and Hinduja personally founded private banks based in Switzerland and India the following decade.
The family’s other holdings included London real estate, service provider Hinduja Global Solutions Ltd and media business Nxtdigital Ltd.
Hinduja had a net worth of about $3.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
“In the professional world, there is always a lot of politics,” he told the UK’s Independent newspaper in 2011. “We say: ‘Let’s follow this philosophy which will give all of us the maximum growth and be better for our health because we will not waste our time becoming upset.’”
Hinduja Group’s assets are owned by family members under a structure guided by the principle that assets held by one belong to all and that each one will appoint the others as their executors.
Starting in 2021, that stance became the focus of a legal battle in the UK, where S.P. lived, as he and his daughter, Vinoo, sought to carve out some of the family’s assets. His three brothers, Gopichand, Prakash and Ashok, wanted the group to stick to its age-old motto that “everything belongs to everyone and nothing belongs to anyone.”
Srichand Parmanand Hinduja was born on November 28, 1935, in British India’s Sindh province, now part of Pakistan.
He and his brother Gopichand moved the operations of the family conglomerate from Iran to London after their father’s death in 1971, according to India’s Global Wealth Club.
With his wife, Madhu, Hinduja had three children: Shanu, Vinoo and Dharam, who died in 1992.