Members of the Pathak family, which founded the UK’s Patak’s Foods, have agreed to settle their feud over the family fortune.
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The High Court has been told that a provisional agreement, believed to be worth up to £12m (US$21.3m), has been reached, reported BBC News Online.
Two of the Pathak daughters, Chitralekha Mehta and Anila Shastri, claimed they had been cheated out of their company shares, but their brother and company boss Kirit Pathak disputed their claim.
The two sisters said they had given their shares to their mother, Shantagaury Pathak, to look after but she had passed them on to Kirit, who later bought out his brothers and parents and took control of the Lancashire-based company.
The daughters had claimed that they were victims of a Hindu tradition in which business assets are passed down to the sons of a family.
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By GlobalDataThe settlement will not become official until the details have been translated into Gujarati so that Shantagaury, who was co-defendant with Kirit in the daughters’ case, can agree to it, the BBC reported.
Shantagaury and her husband Laxmishanker Pathak arrived in the UK from Kenya in 1955 with six children to support and very little money. They began selling samosas to the local Indian community, and then set up a shop and extended their product range to include pickles and chutneys. The company’s products now also include sauces in jars and cans, ready-made meals, pappadums, ready-to-eat breads, Indian snacks, frozen wraps and chilled ready meals. According to the company website, Patak’s products are used by an estimated 90% of Indian restaurants in the UK.
