Prashant Ruia, group chief executive of Essar ©Dhiraj Singh The son also rises: Prashant Ruia is the second generation to lead the family-run group Essar is one of India's most famous family-run businesses, but it takes a visit to its towering Mumbai headquarters to grasp just how important the close familial bonds are in its manage­ment. Up on the building's 19th floor is a sprawling twin office that group chief executive Prashant Ruia shares with his younger brother, Anshuman. Go one floor up and you find an all but identical set-up for the group's billionaire founding brothers, Shasi and Ravikant, Prashant Ruia's father and uncle. But the liking for proximity does not stop there, for the Ruias also all live in the same plush mansion in Mumbai's ritziest neighbourhood - an unusual arrangement, even in a country known for family conglomerates. Another Indian tycoon once remarked that his company made all its major decisions over a weekly family lunch. Mr Ruia smiles. For us the lunch is every day! It's a very, very close-knit family, we all live together, so obviously we meet for lunch every day, but we probably meet much more often than that," he says. You cannot have a situation where one member of the family has a different view and another member has a completely different view. Then it becomes very difficult," he explains. So sometimes it takes a little bit longer for a decision to be made. This consensual approach is a little surprising, given the image of the group he leads. In the west, the company is most often recognised for Essar Energy, the power and refining division that won global attention following its $2bn flotation in London during 2010. But in some quarters in India the company comes with a more mixed reputation - admired for its rapid growth but known also for its ultra-competitive business style. Set up in the 1970s, its buccaneering journey saw the group struggle financially in the late 1990s, while today it has net debts in the region of Rs938bn ($14bn), which were taken on to fund the construction of a growing industrial empire that now spans shipping, infrastructure, steel, power and IT outsourcing. Then there is the group's reportedly sometimes testy past relationship with Vodafone, the UK-based telecoms company to whom Essar sold its stake in the two companies" mobile joint venture for $5bn in 2011, although it is a history on which Mr Ruia has a different view. Frankly, I don't think we had a difficult relationship with Vodafone. I think we had slightly different objectives," he says, before addressing the broader question of his family's reputation for an aggressive business style. I don't think it's true at all. I don't think we have any difference of opinion with any of our competitors in the sectors in which we operate . . . We don't have any issue or any competitive sharp elbowing with anybody," he says. Our broad philosophy as a group is we feel that there's enough opportunity in India. There's enough for everybody to do," he adds, noting that Essar has in recent years built a range of new industrial facilities, including one of the world's most advanced oil refineries, in the western state of Gujarat - an investment drive that he says will help the group increase the $27bn it earned in revenues last year, allowing it in turn to reduce debt. The telecoms operations had deeper consequences for his family, however, when his uncle Ravi resigned as Essar Energy's chairman last year, following charges brought by a special court investigating irregularities in telecoms licences, which he denied. "It was a big vortex of allegations flying around," Mr Ruia says now. But does it change the way we think about the way we operate or the way we do our business? No, because we honestly believe that there is nothing in this case that we have done incorrectly. Born in the southern city of Chennai, Mr Ruia attended university in Mumbai, but turned up to work for the family before he had even finished studying. "The most important training was attending meetings with my dad and uncle," he says. It was quite normal to start early and learn on your feet as opposed to in college. That's what we did. His rise was rapid - perhaps not surprising as a family member. It was not like I was running anything. My father and uncle were really running the business," he says of his early apprenticeship through the group's myriad companies, from where he moved on to manage its offshore drilling and construction divisions. Essar's financial stress in the late-1990s, he says, was a consequence of its decision to take on debt to build a steel plant, only to get caught up in the after-effects of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, in which a wave of currency devolutions caused markets to fall sharply across the region. What did I learn? Obviously, you learn you want to be more conservative," he says. I think it made not only me personally, but all of us, more conservative in our thought processes. You know, India had had a fantastic run . . . So that was the whole mood and we never thought anything could go wrong. As a group, Essar also sometimes faces criticisms for its complex structure and opaque governance. Mr Ruia says one of his main tasks as CEO has been to professionalise the company's management, allowing the family to step back from day-to-day operations, and such accusations clearly frustrate him. I don't think, frankly, it's a question of the governance being weak. If anything, we have a hell of a lot at stake," he says. If somebody [a shareholder] has lost money, in terms of value it's a lot less than what the family is going to lose. Outside work, Mr Ruia enjoys taking his immediate family on skiing trips to the US, and he mentions a jaunt to watch the London Olympics last year. "I've got two young but growing children who take away a lot of my time," he says. Might they join the business as well? "They certainly have an opportunity to come and work for the group, no question about it," he says. We will welcome them. Indeed, it seems like one big decision where no family lunch meeting would be needed at all. What of his own beliefs? His father has expressed admiration for the ultra-libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand, a belief perhaps fitting for a freewheeling billionaire industrialist. But who does he admire? Instead of Indian luminaries, Mr Ruia name checks familiar American figures, such as Steve Jobs and Jack Welch, before returning quickly to the theme of family once again. "I don't think of anything personally that is extremely different or individualised as compared to what my father would think," he says. It's what we think as a family unit, where we would like to take this group, because it is a collective view.