Ilker Ayci’s Air India refusal | Tatas have a problem with expat CEOs

Ilker Ayci, CEO of Tata-led Air India (Illustration: Moneycontrol)

Barely a fortnight after the Tata Group announced the appointment of Ilker Ayci as the new managing director (MD) and chief executive officer (CEO) of its prized acquisition, Air India (AI), the former Turkish Airlines chairman has decided he wasn’t going to take up the coveted job after all.

That a second anointed CEO in the last one year should do an about-turn on joining a Tata group company as its leader is a very poor commentary on the process for such high-profile hires at India’s most storied conglomerate. In March 2021, Tata Motors announced that Marc Llistosella, then the President and CEO of Fuso Truck and Bus Corporation and Head of Daimler Trucks in Asia, wouldn’t be joining as its next MD & CEO as previously announced. This was just a month after the auto company had announced Llistosella’s appointment and months before he would have taken charge. In the present case, Ayci was slated to join on or before April 1.

Drama also surrounded the 2011 selection of Cyrus Mistry as chairman of Tata Sons. Mistry, in fact, had been part of the five-member selection committee appointed by the Tata Sons board to identify a successor to Ratan Tata. For months before that, the committee had considered several candidates from within the Tata Group as well as outside it. Failing to reach a conclusion, it then turned to Mistry. It didn’t turn out to be such a wise choice after all.

In Air India’s case, Ayci’s abrupt decision may have been driven by the controversy his name had generated with RSS-affiliate Swadeshi Jagran Manch opposing his appointment "keeping in view national security". Indeed, while regulatory clearance in such issues is normally a formality, there was suspense around Ayci’s appointment because of his antecedents.

While the rumor mills kept churning out negative news about the man who’s widely credited with the turnaround at Turkish Airlines during his tenure as its chairman between 2015 and 2022, it was his role as an advisor in the 1990s to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, when he was mayor of Istanbul, that had raised some eyebrows.

But all of this information was in the public domain and must certainly have been available to the search agency tasked with the job which would in turn have apprised key decision-makers including Ratan Tata and current chairman N. Chandrasekaran of these issues. If the group chose to go ahead it must have been because it was confident of getting a clearance.

Ayci, in turn, is a vastly experienced professional who would have been aware of the frosty relations between India and Turkey when he took up the AI offer. The CEO job at the country’s erstwhile national airline, was always going to be under the lens coming as it did in the immediate aftermath of its somewhat controversial privatisation.

Following this setback, Air India, will again be headless at a time when it is in the midst of a complex transition from a government-owned entity to a part of a private group which already has two airlines in its stable. At Tata Motors, Llistosella’s refusal last year meant that his predecessor Guenter Butschek had to continue as CEO till June 2021. Since then the company has been headless though, to be fair, that’s not impacted its performance.

Llistosella and Ayci’s decision reversals also spotlight the problems of the group in its constant efforts to recruit non-Indians to leadership roles. At Tata Motors, for instance, in 2011 group CEO Carl-Peter Forster had quit for personal reasons just a year and half after taking up the job. Under Butschek, who joined in 2016 and stayed on for five years, the company staged something of a recovery. Yet, he too decided to relocate to Germany last year, citing personal reasons for his decision.