Anil Ambani: a little movie magic

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The last few years have been as rough for Indian billionaire Anil Ambani as they’ve been stellar for his estranged older brother Mukesh.But 2012 is starting out on a high note for the marathon-running owner of Reliance group. Last week, as the FT reported, Ambani secured a $1.2bn loan from a trio of state-backed Chinese banks, allowing Reliance Communications, his telecoms arm, to pay off a looming bond debt in the nick of time.

This week, the industrialist – whose interests range from power to infrastructure – added a new title: Oscar-nominated producer.

On Tuesday, when the Academy Award nominations were announced in Los Angeles, three films that Ambani’s Reliance Big Entertainment produced via its joint venture with Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio received 11 nominations.

Ambani injected $325m into the studio in 2009, allowing Spielberg to establish his own company after severing his ties with Paramount, the Hollywood studio controlled by Viacom. The company operates as a 50-50 joint venture between DreamWorks and Reliance Big Entertainment, and has released six movies since February 2010, a Reliance Group spokeswoman told beyondbrics.

War Horse, Spielberg’s World War I epic about a boy and his horse received six nominations, including one for cinematography, one for John Williams’ score and one for best picture. Another on the best picture shortlist is The Help – a coming-of-age story set during the Civil Rights-era American South – along with three acting nominations. Hugh Jackman’s robot boxing movie Real Steel rounded it out with a visual effects nod.

Not bad for the man Business Insider named the “biggest loser” of the 2008 financial crisis.

As beyondbrics reported, 2011 wasn’t much better for Ambani. In fact, it was awful. It began with his agreement not to trade in shares over charges that his group misrepresented its end-of-year financial statements and violated overseas borrowing rules. It ended with the revelation that Anil’s Reliance Group used a Mauritius-based fund to make covert investments in one of its own companies, as the FT reported. In between, a number of his company’s senior executives were jailed in the multibillion-dollar telecoms scandal that has rocked the subcontinent.

By contrast, Mukesh did much better: his Reliance Industries began the year with a $7.2bn joint venture with the UK’s BP. Then he took a seat on the board of Bank of America, RIL reported its highest-ever quarterly net profits in its refining and petrochemicals business, and he struck a deal with Disney for next-generation mobile web content.

But Mukesh’s year ended on a rather bum note: embroiled in a fight with the government over the productivity of the very gas fields BP’s investment was supposed to boost. And 2012 is shaping up to be a rough one for RIL as well – it reported its first quarterly drop in profits in more than two years on the same day Anil announced his $1.5bn Chinese loan.

Rumours swirled late last year of an Ambani brothers reconciliation – and, indeed, as beyondbrics reported, the two met publicly for the first time in years at a celebration of their late father’s birth at the end of December.

But after years in which Mukesh always seemed to come out on top, Anil may just be feeling like a little bit of the magic of the movies has rubbed off on him.

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