“I have withdrawn all the cases. I don’t want to fight,” Samir Modi told ET during an interaction at his New Delhi office. He has been embroiled in a bitter conflict over distribution of the late KK Modi legacy. His other family members include sibling Lalit Modi, the former boss of the Indian Premier League (IPL).
Both brothers have blamed their mother for not following through with the letter and spirit of the family trust, which is the mechanism laid out by their late father KK Modi for distribution of the family wealth. “I don’t like conflicts. I am not a fighter. I am a builder,” said Modi when asked what prompted him to withdraw lawsuits including one that alleged his mother played a role in getting him physically assaulted at a board meeting of their flagship company Godfrey Phillips India in 2024. He was sacked from the company’s board in August the same year.
The Modi Enterprises group to which they belong has interests cutting across tobacco, fertilizers, network marketing and cosmetics. Flagship Godfrey Phillips India, which is listed, has a market value of nearly ₹35,000 crore. It manufactures and distributes Marlboro in India.
Other family members, including Bina Modi and Lalit Modi, could not immediately be reached for their comments. Modi chose to talk about his current business interests when probed about possible solutions for the impasse that the family had found itself in but said he was hopeful of reconciliation. He is in charge of network marketing company Modicare and cosmetics company Colorbar. “Hope is that the family reconciles. Legacies are beyond companies. Families outlast companies,” he said. His mother, Bina Modi, who is the chairperson of Godfrey Phillips India, had told ET in a September 16, 2024, interview that her late husband KK Modi’s legacy was “not for sale”.
There have been moves to appoint two of the big five auditors to arrive at a mutually acceptable valuation for the businesses that are housed in the Modi family trust, according to sources close to the family. That could help decide who gets what. But no consensus has been reached.
The Modi family has had a history of discordant separations. The family that traces its lineage to pre-independent India’s noted industrialist Gujarmal Modi has gone through sixteen separations over eight generations, as per these sources.”At Modicare we have 60 lakh consultants, give or take, because some of them fall in and out of the network. We have over 12,000 distribution touchpoints for Modicare. We have 5,500 outlets for Colorbar” he said. Modi, who is now in his mid-fifties, talked about his training in the group’s tobacco arm in the early years of his initiation into the family business.
“I started in 1989 with GPI (Godfrey Phillips India). I worked at our Ghaziabad manufacturing unit and later worked with the Japan tobacco team at our Andheri unit in Mumbai. After college, I went to Phillip Morris’s manufacturing facilities and then as a management trainee with the Marlboro team. I later became brand manager at Marlboro. After coming back from the US, I was given the product company Modern Home Care to revive it. I then started Modicare and then sold brands of Modern Homecare to Henkel after the brand became successful. We started 24/7 in 2010,” he said.
“Everything I built, I built for the family and for the legacy. I sacrificed…”
