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British media pays tribute to Dhirubhai

Dhirubhai Ambani, Reliance Group chairman who died last Saturday, was on Tuesday hailed by the British media as one of India's most dynamic and "flamboyant entrepreneurs."

"Combining a keen sense of business with a razor-sharp ability to negotiate his way through the labyrinth of the Indian political establishment, Ambani single-handedly built a business empire that in just three decades outgrew corporate houses such as the Tatas and Birlas which had dominated the country's industrial landscape for nearly a century," The Times wrote in its obituary column.

Reliance is the only Indian private company to make it to the Fortune 500 list of the world's largest corporations, and Ambani was listed by Forbes as the 138th richest person in the world this year.

Son of a petty trader from a remote village in rural Gujarat, Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani - known as Dhirubhai - moved to Aden as a teenager in order to seek his fortune. He started working as an attendant in a petrol station before taking up a clerical position for an oil company that was the sole distributor of Shell products there.

While in Aden, home to many Gujarati expatriates, he realised that a discrepancy between the rial-sterling exchange rate and the intrinsic value of the silver content in Aden's coinage afforded an excellent opportunity to make money.

This arbitrage generated some $3,000 in seed money for the modest trading enterprise that Ambani set up when he returned to Mumbai in 1958.

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