Investor impatience at Zee and Vodafone Idea gets a breather

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Editor's note: This is the eighteenth edition of Street Smart, The Morning Context’s weekly newsletter on everything that impacts corporate India. Every Thursday, Street Smart will bring you an original, reported or analytical take on issues that have the potential to shake up the business ecosystem. Surendar here. This week we try to make sense of the two big events that will have ramifications for two marquee companies - India’s biggest media company Zee Entertainment and the third largest telecoms player Vodafone Idea. At Zee, investors are showing their impatience with the status quo, while the government's flip-flop on telecoms policy may just about keep Vodafone Idea going and stop the Indian telecoms market from becoming a duopoly.  A coup at Zee? There is siege on at India’s biggest and most valuable media company, the Mumbai-based Zee Entertainment.  It’s biggest investor, Invesco Oppenheimer, a US-based hedge fund, wants to replace several of Zee’s directors, including Punit Goenka, the current managing director and CEO and son of the company’s founder Subhash Chandra. Incidentally, it was Invesco that bailed out Chandra in August 2019 …