Indian police found on Thursday a car with explosives near the home of Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and chairman of Indian oil-to-telecoms conglomerate Reliance Industries
Reliance Industries is the most valuable company in India and has diversified operations, including oil refining. Reliance Industries owns the biggest refinery in India and the biggest refining hub in the world, Jamnagar. The refinery has a crude oil processing capacity of 1.24 million barrels per day, while Reliance Industries is also invested in oil exploration and production, petrochemicals, textiles, telecoms, and retail.
A suspicious vehicle was found near Ambani’s residence on Thursday evening, India time, the Mumbai Police said in a tweet.
“Police teams reached the spot immediately, examined & found some explosive material Gelatin inside. It’s not an assembled explosive device. Further investigation is going on,” the police said.
Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh told Indian television channels that the vehicle, a Scorpio van, was found some distance away from Ambani’s house.
In July last year, Reliance Industries briefly surpassed Exxon as the world’s second most valuable firm doing business in energy after Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco. The Indian conglomerate, however, is not an energy firm per se, and most of the market rally in the middle of last year was thanks to its digital and retail operations, not the oil industry.
However, shares in Reliance Industries slipped in the latter half of 2020, which booted Ambani out of the top ten of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in December. Earlier in 2020, Ambani sat at number four on that list, but the drop in Reliance Industries’ stock diminished the Indian billionaire’s estimated net worth. Currently, Ambani, who controls 42 percent of Reliance Industries, is number 12 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with a net worth estimated at US$80.6 billion.
