The pressure on Union Textile Minister Dayanidhi Maran has intensified after former Aircel boss Sivashankaran told the CBI that he was arm twisted into selling Aircel to Maxis when Maran was telecom minister. But just who is Sivasankaran?
Sivasankaran, former promoter of telecom company Aircel, and the Maran brothers were once friends. But now they are bitter enemies.
However, the relationship between the Marans and Siva has not been all that bad.
A little known fact is that Kalanidhi Maran worked at Siva Computers, a computer hardware company owned by Sivasankaran, for a brief time in the late 1980s.
But as Siva – who has a reputation for being a maverick investor – grew in his ambitions, the friction started.
Siva's business ambitions stretched from Banking to DTH. His buyout of coffee chain Barista from Tatas brought him close to Ratan Tata. Sivasankaran then started talks with the Tata group for DTH. At that time Sun Group was also keen to enter DTH space in partnership with the Tata group. This led to the souring of relations between Marans and Sivasankaran.
It was around the same time in 2004-05 that Aircel also applied for seven other circles besides the nine they were operating in.
When there was a delay in offer of licences from DoT, Sivasankaran came out of the telecom space selling a majority stake to Malaysian telecom company Maxis. Today Siva claims he was armtwisted by the Marans into selling out, charges which could spell disaster for Dayanidhi’s political career.
“The Maran brothers were very ambitious and Sivasankaran and his telecom company was an easy target because Dayanidhi was the telecom minister. Had the arm-twisting happened I won’t be surprised,” said Cho Ramaswamy, a writer and political analyst.
Sivasankaran now is an NRI handling business from California and his new interests extend from renewable energy to oil.
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