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Anil Ambani is an Indian business mogul and chairman of Reliance Group.
Ambani completed a B.Sc. at Kishinchand Chellaram College in Bombay (now Mumbai) and later studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received an M.B.A. from its prestigious Wharton School in 1983. He returned to India and joined his father, Dhirubhai Ambani, in carrying out his duties as chief executive officer. After his father suffered a stroke in 1985, Anil Ambani took on day-to-day management of the company’s financial relationships under his father’s oversight.
He and his brother, Mukesh Ambani, assumed joint leadership of the Reliance companies after their father’s death in 2002. However, the brothers’ feuding over control prompted their mother, Kokilaben Ambani, to split Reliance’s assets via a noncompetition agreement in 2005. Mukesh Ambani assumed control of Reliance Industries Limited and its more traditional units, while Anil Ambani gained control of the telecommunications, power generation, and financial services units through a demerger. After amending the noncompetition agreement in 2010, the brothers agreed in 2013 to share their companies’ telecommunication networks in their first major cooperative effort since 2005.
In the political sphere, Anil Ambani was elected in 2004 to represent Uttar Pradesh state in the Rajya Sabha, the upper chamber of India’s legislature. He resigned in 2006 amid public controversy over members of parliament holding offices of profit. The controversy had forced the resignation of Sonia Gandhi, leader of the Indian National Congress, from the lower chamber only days earlier. Although Ambani was not accused of any wrongdoing amid the controversy, he cited his “firm view” that public servants should remain free from the possibility of controversy.
