LONG READ: ADANI’S MILLIONS IN MAURITIUS
Nileena MS
SOMETIME IN THE MIDDLE OF 2018, a team from the Central Bureau of Investigation touched down at the airport near Port Louis, the picturesque capital of the Indian Ocean tax haven of Mauritius. It had a straightforward task at hand. Over the past four years, the CBI had been investigating one of India’s most carefully-documented defence corruption cases.
Italian and Indian investigations had found that executives of the European companies AgustaWestland and Finmeccanica paid kickbacks to intermediaries and to senior members of the Indian government and armed forces, to manipulate technical evaluations and secure contracts for India’s purchase of 12 helicopters, worth Rs 3,727 crore. The routing of the money had already been traced to a Mauritian company called Interstellar Technologies.
The CBI team first visited the Mauritian attorney general’s office, collecting the bank and company documents of Interstellar and a few related firms. The former office of Interstellar was not far from there—less than a ten-minute walk, past the construction site of the modernist Supreme Court building that the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, would inaugurate two years later. A stroll across that, across a few bed-and-breakfasts and a lonely Chinese eatery, lay a cute white wooden house with a black-tiled roof, its walls decked in several varieties of bougainvillea: 44, Rue St Georges.
In my investigation into defence corruption by the same network, in 2023, I had collated only the clearly legible bank statements of the company to find that Interstellar had received at least Rs 250 crore, over fifteen years, in kickbacks from arms manufacturers. Most of this was siphoned through this house that would not look out of place in a picture postcard or tourism brochure. The Enforcement Directorate, which was investigating the case, had concluded that the company was controlled and financially managed by, and ultimately benefitted, a Delhi-based defence-middleman called Sushen Gupta.
The CBI officers should have been very familiar with 44, Rue St Georges. The address appeared all over the AgustaWestland case, with a regularity that was unmissable. Some of Sushen’s money for the deal was routed to his Indian companies through another Mauritian firm called Sabhah Investments, which shared the same address—also listed for Kreston, which functioned as the director of Interstellar between 2003 and 2008.
The easiest company to spot at the house would have been FIDECO Global Business Services, which was functioning as the secretary, management company and registered agent of Interstellar until 2008—though its signatures appear on Interstellar documents well after the conclusion of the AgustaWestland deal. It also functioned as the director of two other Mauritian firms through which AgustaWestland kickbacks were suspected to have been routed, and whose details the ED had received from Mauritian authorities. FIDECO shared the same address, and the officers would have seen as much if they visited the house, with the name printed in neat black print at the gate. More interestingly, even before the AgustaWestland case, the address had come up in other defence corruption investigations by the ED and CBI.
In 2014, a CBI court framed charges in a sensational 2006 case where over seven thousand pages of classified military documents—including details of the 2005 Scorpène submarine deal—had been leaked from India’s naval headquarters to various arms dealers and intermediaries. Times of India reported that the two main suspects—including the Shiv Sena politician and arms dealer Abhishek Verma—were associated with two companies, Atlas Defence Systems and Atlas Interactive India, whose Mauritian counterparts were also registered at 44, Rue St Georges and managed by FIDECO. Verma did not respond to questions from The Caravan. The agencies had encountered FIDECO another time, too, in relation to Asia’s third richest man, Gautam Adani.
It seems incredulous that when both the CBI and the ED tracked down companies siphoning off funds in two defence corruption cases—which would have serious implications for national security—they chose to turn a blind eye to the fact that the companies were facilitating money-laundering for one of India’s richest oligarchs.
Shortly before Modi became prime minister, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence—an agency under the union finance ministry—began investigating over-invoicing of imports by major private players in the power sector. The modus operandi was rather simple. An Indian company could buy material from an intermediary at the normal price but record, say, double that amount in the invoice. It could then sell to an Indian power generator at the doubled cost and, along with the middle-man, pocket the profits. This money would be unaccounted for and, thus, had to be stored away in tax havens such as Mauritius.
One of the earliest companies the DRI had narrowed in on for what seemed to be clear evidence of over-invoicing was the Ahmedabad-based infrastructure development company PMC Projects (India). PMC had been contracted by the Maharashtra Eastern Grid Power Generation Company, a subsidiary of Adani Power, to purchase material and equipment. A portion of this—involving the purchase of auto transformers, shunt reactors and optical-fibre ground wire—was subcontracted to a Dubai-based firm called Electrogen Infra. Electrogen purchased these items from a South Korean company for Rs 390.15 crore, but sold them to PMC for Rs 1,867.24 crore. Electrogen pocketed Rs 1,477 crore in the process. The DRI noted that, “given the scale and extent of invoice inflation, it is apparent that it was with fraudulent intent of siphoning money from India.” The DRI also identified overvaluation to the tune of Rs 3,974 crore in the imports of two Adani Power subsidiaries from suppliers in China, Japan and Germany. These costs would be borne by taxpayers and anyone switching on their lights in Maharashtra.
The Adani group denied having any association with PMC and Electrogen. However, documents provided by Electrogen to Indian banks show that it was ultimately owned by Asankhya Resources Family Trust, an entity based in the Cayman Islands which was controlled by Gautam’s elder brother, Vinod Adani. Media-shy and working primarily abroad, Vinod would shoot into public attention in 2023, following a damning report by the US short-seller Hindenburg Research and follow-up reporting by Forbes. The reports noted that he managed affairs through a network of at least sixty shell companies registered in far-flung tax havens, including Mauritius, the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, the United Arab Emirates, the Cayman Islands, Cyprus and Singapore.
“Whenever the links between offshore companies controlled by Vinod and the Adani group was brought up, the Adani group had always refuted this,” the journalist Ravi Nair, who has long been reporting on the group, told me. It was only after the Hindenburg report, in a stock exchange filing, that the group finally admitted that Vinod was one of its promoters. But, to anyone monitoring the group’s funds, the connection was apparent. Electrogen’s parent company, for example, is another Mauritian entity called Electrogen Infra Holding, which Vinod has owned since 2010. When the DRI approached its adjudicating authority in late 2016, Nair said, “Vinod Adani, who was an NRI residing in Dubai at that time, acquired a golden passport of Cyprus, which is given to individuals who invest €2 million in the country. Later, in his reply to the DRI, he said that he is not an Indian citizen, and the DRI has no jurisdiction to summon him.” PMC Projects, meanwhile, was owned by a Mauritian company called Project Monitoring Construction, whose registered address was also 44, Rue St Georges.
The Mauritian companies’ registry also includes a firm called Project Monitoring and Construction, which was a shareholder in Adani’s flagship Mundra Port and Special Economic Zone. Mundra was the group’s first major infrastructure project, which would lay the foundation for an empire that currently includes more than two hundred ports, airports, power stations, cement plants, mines, defence factories, renewable-energy farms, electrical facilities and gas distribution networks. According to a prospectus shared by the Adani group itself, the registered office of PM&C is “FIDECO Global Business Services Limited, 44 St. Georges Street, Port Louis.”
All of this was information the DRI had already collated and handed over to the CBI in June 2014, a few weeks after Modi won his first general election on an anti-corruption plank. However, the CBI dragged its feet, naming a handful of bankers in its preliminary inquiry and closing the case within a year. The ED also investigated the case, but it seems to have gone nowhere.
While the evidence so far stops short of directly implicating the Adani group in defence corruption cases, it is clear that the group created a complex financial routing network through Mauritius which has been used by arms dealers, seedy intermediaries and convicted criminals.
The CBI was active in the case, but not in the way we might imagine. In his book A Feast of Vultures, the investigative journalist Josy Joseph notes that the officer heading the DRI’s Ahmedabad branch “was raided by the CBI, which accused him of possessing disproportionate assets. It failed to prove anything at all, despite months of investigation.” Alongside this, “the two senior-most officers in the Mumbai regional office, who oversaw the investigations in Ahmedabad, were forced out of the agency.” These officials had also been handling other critical money-laundering cases, and while a clear causal relationship cannot be drawn, such convenient and vindictive government decisions seem to appear with surprising frequency in financial investigations against the Adani group.
It might not be quite so surprising, then, that when both the CBI and the ED tracked down companies siphoning off funds in two defence corruption cases, which would have serious implications for national security, it chose to turn a blind eye to the company facilitating money-laundering for one of India’s richest oligarchs. And this was not just one missed detail. Four other companies investigated in the AgustaWestland case were closely associated with Adani’s sprawling multinational empire.
While the evidence so far stops short of directly implicating the Adani group in defence corruption cases, it is clear that the group created a complex financial routing network through Mauritius which has been used by arms dealers, seedy intermediaries and convicted criminals. Across all of these deals is the same cast of companies, all managed by the same handful of Mauritian, Indian, Emirati and Taiwanese nationals who worked for Adani companies while their network pushed through defence kickbacks. These people were never touched by the ED or the CBI in any of the 14 chargesheets and prosecution complaints in the AgustaWestland case.
For decades, loopholes in taxation avoidance agreements between India and Mauritius have been misused by Indian businesses for round-tripping—where illegal earnings parked offshore are brought back as clean money while preserving anonymity. “Tax avoidance through tax planning is legal, tax evasion is illegal,” the senior journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, who has written a book about the Mauritius route, told me. “Avoidance and evasion by Indian entities in Mauritius are separated by a rather thin line.”
The workings of these Adani-linked entities and their offshore investors were brought out by investigative journalists from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, The Morning Context, Financial Times, Forbes, and Indian Express and Adani Watch—an online portal that publishes investigative reports on the group. Meanwhile, the investigative agencies carefully stepped away when they came across these links. Though the DRI’s cases fell apart in courts after the Modi government came to power, the agency had, to its credit, successfully traced parts of this network across tax havens in multiple investigations.
A politician–corporate nexus has enabled the Mauritian route to thrive. That there are continuing links between the Mauritian entities involved in the stock market manipulation cases from 2001 to 2023 is closely intertwined with the rise of oligarchy in India. “This is all political,” Arun Kumar, a retired professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University who has specialised in studying black money, told me. “That’s why the big businesses have links with the politicians, so that these investigations don’t proceed. Even if they proceed, they are not done properly, so that they fail.”
Over the past few months, while analysing the filings, ownership patterns and transactions of more than a hundred and ten firms in India, Singapore, Mauritius and beyond, I found a clear pattern. The ED and the CBI, while investigating other cases, would routinely arrive at Adani-linked companies through which funds had been siphoned either into or out of India. These involved proceeds from a range of alleged financial misdemeanours, including what amounts to over-invoicing, stock manipulation, insider trading, tax evasion, violations of securities law and money-laundering.
The way was simply cleared for India’s largest business empire—encompassing not just coal power and ports but also airports, cement, apples, edible oils, grains, data centres and a television news channel—to never face the slightest financial scrutiny.
Rather than working these leads, the agencies would omit them from their reports and look no further, despite mounting evidence of financial fraud. A lack of action against these firms meant that they could be used by Gautam to route funds back into India whenever his empire was threatened, such as during the aftermath of the Hindenburg Research report. The way was simply cleared for India’s largest business empire—encompassing not just coal power and ports but also airports, cement, apples, edible oils, grains, data centres and a television news channel—to never face the slightest financial scrutiny.
REGARDLESS OF WHAT the hagiographies claim, the Adani family was never poor by any stretch of the imagination. But few who were familiar with its business’s underlying finances would have bet that Gautam Adani would go from a college dropout diamond trader to among India’s wealthiest. From his earliest days, it is clear that Gautam excelled where friendly relationships helped bypass legal requirements, in industries where accountability and oversight were rarer than the diamonds he traded in.
The fifth son of a Jain family trading in castor seeds and textiles, in the arid town of Deesa in Gujarat’s Banaskantha region, Gautam entered a network where the risks of trading were minimal and familial connections saw him through. As one of the many hagiographies put it, “If a man defaults, it is customary for other relatives of the family to pool in their resources to redeem the family name.” In 1978, after his schooling in Deesa and Ahmedabad, Gautam enrolled in a south Bombay college, not far from the city’s diamond markets, for a bachelor’s degree in commerce. A few months later, a cousin got him a job sorting and assessing gems at Mahendra Brothers, a diamond exporter. It was a business that honed many of the skills he would use to help his empire reach unparalleled heights.
The diamond industry needed money and materials to be pushed between countries, often with speculative values, and required partners across international lines to keep trust of this wealth. Gautam thrived in it, soon starting his own diamond export with two other cousins. By the mid-2000s, Adani’s import activities had come under the DRI scanner. His companies were accused of misrepresenting the value of exported goods and fraudulently availing financial benefits from various export promotion schemes in the import of cut and polished diamonds and studded gold jewellery.
The business eventually required wider connections. When asked about the practice of over-invoicing by Indian corporates which leads to the generation of black money, Kumar explained, “a triad of businessmen, politicians and executive operates to perpetuate this black-income generation, because, if under-invoicing and over-invoicing has been happening for a long period of time, then you have to have contacts with bureaucrats, income tax officers and politicians who will protect you.” Kumar says these networks have been operational since the 1970s. Adani was following a pattern already set by Indian corporates to circulate alleged illegal earnings. In his case, offshore entities in Mauritius and Singapore were allegedly used to artificially inflate profits according to the DRI. This suggests that the first whiffs of the Mauritius network were evident in Gautam’s very first business venture.
By his third year of college, he was back home in Ahmedabad, bringing his importing and exporting experience to a plastics-processing unit his elder brother Mahasukh had bought from Sevantilal Vora, a family friend whose daughter Gautam would marry. Gautam’s role was to manage the marketing and procurement of raw materials from abroad, now at a scale that would dwarf the diamond business. It was a trade he excelled at, going from importing twenty tonnes of raw material in his first year to about seventy thousand tonnes by the third, enough to feed the family’s three PVC film factories in Gujarat and to sell to various plastics manufacturers across the country.
Gautam had a certain advantage due to a closeness with the state’s Congress governments during the 1980s, under Madhavsinh Solanki and Amarsinh Chaudhary. It gave him opportunities that other importers could only gawk at. For instance, he struck a deal with the Gujarat State Export Corporation, paying a small premium to access the large bank of unused credits for duty-free imports it had amassed. In the very first year of the deal, Gautam imported Rs 10 crore worth of plastic raw material. This made the family a dominant player when liberalisation took hold in India in the 1990s.
In 1988, with India facing a mounting foreign exchange crisis—the country imported far more than it exported—Gautam founded Adani Exports. Publicly listed in 1994, the company began to export everything from toothpaste and shoe polish to seafood and cosmetics. This began a pattern, outlined by the geopolitical analyst James Crabtree in his book The Billionaire Raj, of earning a small amount in one business, then taking on heavy debts against this income to finance expansion into another. A decade later, when the value of Adani companies grew more than a hundredfold, the group amassed a debt of over $14 billion, while continuing to expand. The group’s other major source of funds has been foreign portfolio investors largely concentrated in Mauritius.
Adani Exports was Gautam’s first venture to take advantage of sudden shifts in government policy to catapult its way to outsized profits. It also allowed the Adani group to begin partnering with some of the world’s largest commodity giants. The first major partner was the US multinational food corporation Cargill, which, in 1990, set up a joint venture with Adani to export Indian salt. The plan was to set up a major salt-panning facility in the historic port of Mundra, where the venture would build a jetty for easy exports, at an estimated cost of Rs 100 crore. Two years later, when policy changes allowed foreign companies to own the full equity of state-owned ports, Cargill attempted to strong-arm Adani into giving up a majority stake in the project. Adani was able to rebuff this with the help of the Congress-run state government, which pushed Cargill towards the Kandla port, making Mundra his own. But a project of this size would require far more funding than the plastics manufacturer had.
At least part of the funding for the Mundra port came from Adani’s own hidden Mauritius networks—later identified as being controlled by Vinod Adani and his associates—that the Adani group continue to maintain they have no link to.
Gujarat Adani Ports was incorporated in 1998 and began quickly acquiring the surrounding marshland and salt pans from locals at throwaway prices. Three years later, the same year Modi became the state’s chief minister, the group was granted a thirty-year concession to run what would become the Mundra Port, with an extensive special economic zone surrounding it added later. The port and surrounding SEZ now occupy more than six thousand hectares. At least part of the funding for it came from Adani’s own hidden Mauritius networks, later identified as being controlled by Vinod and his associates.
When Mundra Port and Special Economic Zone issued its initial public offering—a preliminary sale of stocks, that makes a company publicly traded—in 2007, it had to submit a red-herring prospectus, with the company’s initial details, to the Securities and Exchange Board of India. Among its top ten shareholders before the IPO, according to the prospectus, were Project Monitoring and Construction and two firms called Gudami International, one based in Mauritius and the other in Singapore. Gudami was listed by Adani Exports in Bombay Stock Exchange filings as a “related party.” Such foreign direct investments to the country was a standard practice of the Mauritius route used by a large section of India’s corporates. Gudami’s name would also turn up in the money trail of the CBI and the ED’s investigations into AgustaWestland.
Shortly before the IPO, these three companies alone held more than 58 million equity shares, more than sixteen percent of the full company. In October 2007, PM&C transferred shares worth Rs 150 crore to Trident Trade and Investment, while another Rs 7 lakh worth of shares were transferred to Pride Trade and Investment. The Adani group’s 2008 annual filings listed the companies, both of which had Vinod as a director, as subsidiaries.
The second major commodity giant Adani tied up with, in the early 1990s, was Wilmar International. In December 1998, with the initial jetty in Mundra nearing completion, Gautam was in Singapore to meet Wilmar’s founder, Kuok Khoon Hong—infamously known as the “Palm Oil King” for his stranglehold on the edible-oil markets of Indonesia and Malaysia. Soon, Kuok visited the jetty at Mundra. On the back of his airline boarding pass, the two corporations jotted down the terms for Adani Wilmar, a joint venture that would come to dominate India’s fast-moving consumer goods market, with a current net worth of over Rs 8,200 crore. In December 2024, Adani sold its 44 percent stake in its joint venture, which is now called AWL Agri Business. The two already had a working relationship, having collaborated on refining and packing edible oils in Bangladesh since 1993.
While the primary focus of the joint venture has been on edible oil and other foodstuffs, Adani Wilmar has faced investigations regarding its imports in other sectors too. In March 2016, the DRI began probing 40 companies for large-scale over-invoicing in coal imports from Indonesia. While nearly every major conglomerate in the power industry—including Reliance Infrastructure, Essar Power and Jindal South West Steel—was probed by the agency, the Adani companies stood out in their number and interconnectedness.
The DRI found that, while coal was shipped directly from Indonesia to power corporations in India, invoices would be sent through intermediaries in Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands, with the value of the coal inexplicably increasing at each step. A detailed investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and the Financial Times found that, in some Adani shipments, not only would the coal nearly triple in cost during the two weeks it was at sea, its recorded quality would mysteriously improve from cheap steam coal to the high-quality coal required by government power corporations. This would burden ordinary Indians with inflated fuel costs, while increasing pollution due to burning lower quality coal. Nearly two million air pollution deaths are recorded in the country every year. The companies investigated by the DRI included Adani Enterprises—as Adani Exports was rechristened in 2006—Adani Power, Adani Power Rajasthan, Adani Power Maharashtra and Adani Wilmar.
The DRI’s investigation was frequently frustrated not just by the Adani group’s unwillingness to cooperate but by various government departments going as far as to question the very right of the agency to conduct such an inquiry. In August 2016, the DRI issued a letter rogatory—a request for assistance from one jurisdiction to another—to Singapore, asking for documents pertaining to the imports of Indonesian coal by Adani subsidiaries, including Adani Wilmar, along with records from banks and shipping companies associated with the imports. Both a lower and a higher court in Singapore ruled that the group must share the files.
A detailed investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and the Financial Times found that, in some Adani shipments, not only would the coal nearly triple in cost during the two weeks it was at sea, its recorded quality would mysteriously improve from cheap steam coal to the high-quality coal required by government power corporations.
However, in India, state-owned banks, including the State Bank of India and Bank of Baroda, refused to share documents from their Singapore and Dubai branches, citing confidentiality norms. The Reserve Bank of India, too, backed the banks instead of the finance ministry’s own agency. The Adani group then approached the courts, challenging the DRI’s right to even issue a letter rogatory. The Bombay High Court bought its argument, banning the DRI from using its primary tool for soliciting international cooperation in its investigations into smuggling, drug-trafficking and commercial fraud in international trade and evasion of customs duty. While this caused a major panic, and the Supreme Court later stayed this judgment, Adani subsidiaries were still exempt from sharing any documentation regarding coal over-invoicing from Indonesia. In its response the Adani group denied having challenged the DRI’s right to issue letters rogatory.
FIDECO, Jingree, the Adani group, Adani Ports and Mundra Port’s CEO, Malay Mahadevia, did not respond to questions. Neither did PMC, Adani Power, Adani Wilmar, ADM or any of its many Indian and Mauritian subsidiaries.
According to Wilmar’s annual reports, its controlling shareholder till recently is the Archer-Daniels-Midland Company, a US food-processing giant, and its international board of directors has always included a top ADM executive. In 2006, ADM owned more than half of all Wilmar shares. By 2018 it had come down to around 25 per cent and has reduced since. Adani Wilmar’s company documents list Swiss and Australian subsidiaries of ADM as related parties.
ADM has faced regulatory action in multiple countries for corruption and violation of corporate laws, being fined nearly £7 million by British authorities for its failure to implement systems to prevent money-laundering. The lawyer Gautam Khaitan, who had authorised all the transfers of the kickbacks in the AgustaWestland case, was the director of the Indian subsidiary of this UK company. ADM was also being investigated by the US justice department for disparities in the reporting of sales and for overstating its annual operating profits, while being charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to prevent illicit payments of $21 million to Ukrainian government officials.
Around the time the Adani Wilmar joint venture was being created—the agreement was signed not by Wilmar International itself but by a Mauritian subsidiary—ADM incorporated three Mauritian companies: ADM Interoceanic, ADM Concentrated Toco and ADM Indonesian Holdings. In 2014, when the ED raided the Delhi office of Khaitan, the agency would have found that he was director of two of companies’ Indian subsidiaries during late 2000s, and that all the Indian subsidiaries of ADM were headquartered in his own office. If the agencies had bothered to look, they would have found that the three Mauritian ADM companies were managed by an agency called Kross Border Trust Services, which had also earlier managed Adani Global—described in its 2006 filings as an internal trading and holding company of the Adani empire. Two also had former directors of Adani Global as their directors.
ADANI’S VERY FIRST COMPANY was where his work with the Mauritius network began. “When it comes to Adani, there are two kinds of structures in Mauritius,” Ravi Nair told me. “One is completely controlled by Vinod Adani, second is controlled by the promotor group.” The man central to this network appears to be a controversial Mauritian businessman named Jayechund Jingree. In 1993, as a senior managing partner at KPMG—one of the big four multinationals that have a chokehold on international accounting and professional services—Jingree established an affiliate, called KPMG Peat Marwick International, as a company administration and accounting service for international clients using the tax haven. The affiliate, which later changed its name to Kross Border Trust Services, was not unusual in its operations.
Management companies such as FIDECO and KBTS are licensed service providers that act as intermediaries between business houses setting up companies in Mauritius and the country’s regulator for non-banking financial services. They help clients in incorporating, managing and providing nominee officers to carry out international business operations. They also provide registered offices and nominee shareholders, maintain accounts and ensure compliance with company and tax laws. They are required to vet the identity of their clients and enquire about the source of funds being invested in the companies, to prevent money-laundering. Foreign companies often hide behind the veil of management companies as they route money through the tax haven. “Offshore entities of Indian corporates in Mauritius are not listed,” Nair explained. “A chartered accountant or auditor would audit and give a certificate saying that this is the income of the company. No one is going to scrutinise it.”
“When it comes to Adani, there are two kinds of structures in Mauritius. One is completely controlled by Vinod Adani, second is controlled by the promotor group.”
Despite being a tiny archipelago of just over a million people—about the size of Meerut, Rajkot or Varanasi—Mauritius has, for years, been India’s single-largest source of foreign direct investment. Since the 1980s, the country’s secretive banking regime has made it a favourite ground for arms dealers, oligarchs and dodgy politicians to invent webs of shell companies from which money can be “invested” into Indian enterprises, washing away its dubious origin. It is famous enough for the “Mauritius route” to be common in financial parlance. But what set KBTS apart was the close relationship it enjoyed with the Mauritian government. The country’s leading daily, L’Express Mauritius, describes Jingree as a key confidante and financier for Anerood Jugnauth—who was president between 2003 and 2012, and prime minister for nearly two decades. Jingree’s co-founder at KBTS was Jugnauth’s senior economic advisor.
In 1997, Adani Exports created a wholly-owned subsidiary in Mauritius called Adani Global, with Vinod and Chang Chung-Ling, a Taiwanese national, as its directors. Within a year, the subsidiary had appointed a Mauritian firm called Acorn Services as its secretary—a position meant to handle all its administrative affairs as well as ensure compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. Acorn’s director was Sushil Kumar Jugoo, Jingree’s partner and fellow director at KBTS. Jugoo was also a director of Adani Global between 2002 and 2005. Adani Exports’ 2005 annual reports list KBTS, by then independent of KPMG, as its new company secretary. Its 2010 shareholders included Asia Advantage Fund, a Mauritian company that shared an address with KBTS, which was also its secretary.
But these were only arrangements over management—nothing patently illegal. In 2001, however, the Indian stock market registered one of its biggest ever crashes. Already facing mounting pressure over allegations of defence corruption, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government tasked the SEBI and a joint parliamentary committee to investigate the crash. The investigation revealed one of the largest insider-trading cases in Indian history, implicating both Adani and Jingree.
Indian stock broker Ketan Parekh is escorted into a courtroom by CBI officers in Mumbai, on 31 March 2001. It is clear that the Adani group, Parekh’s associates and the Mauritian intermediary Jayechund Jingree worked in tandem both during and after the 2001 scandal. JSG/DL
The obvious cause for the crash was that Madhavpura Bank, a Gujarat-based cooperative, was unable to pay back Rs 800 crore to its nearly fifty thousand depositors. Much of that money had been lent to stockbrokers, in gross violation of RBI guidelines. The biggest violator was Ketan Parekh, a Mumbai-based stockbroker whose crimes should have been rather obvious from the start. In 1992, the stock markets had been rocked after the Gujarati stockbroker Harshad Mehta was found to have siphoned money from the banking system to invest in stocks, even going as far as to operate the SBI’s account with the RBI as his own. The financial journalists Sucheta Dalal and Debashis Basu marvelled at the scale of the scam, describing it as “larger than the health budget, larger than the education budget, [making] millions of rupees look like loose change.” Parekh, a shy and quiet understudy of Harshad at the time, was never caught, pulling off a similar scam a decade later while being advised by Mehta’s publicity-shy brother.
Parekh’s modus operandi was attempting to drum up public interest in the stocks of certain companies by colluding with them and with local and international banks. He would take money from select corporations—which he presumptively called the K-10 stocks—to simultaneously buy and sell their stocks through various companies in a complex web he had created, suddenly making it seem like the company was making major gains in the stock market despite there being no real reason for the growing interest. This practice, called circular trading, is strictly illegal.
To make the situation worse, Parekh was doing this largely using money that was not his—bank loans without securities that should have not have been given in the first place. As the price of these stocks shot up to ten or twenty times their original value, these stocks were dumped onto foreign institutional investors such as Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse First Boston, backed by Parekh’s influence and popularity and the visible interest in the market.
The Adani group’s stock prices suddenly rose from Rs 620 in November 1999 to over Rs 1,200 in a month. The joint parliamentary committee’s report pointed out that, on a particular day in August 2000, Adani Exports shares constituted 96 percent of the trading volume at the National Stock Exchange.
The shares of ten companies saw significant increases in prices and volumes in the six months following October 1999. This was clearly visible in the case of Adani Exports, whose stock price almost doubled within a month after two entities associated with Parekh sold two hundred thousand shares, worth nearly Rs 10 crore, to other companies tied to him. The Adani group’s stock prices suddenly rose from Rs 620 in November 1999 to over Rs 1,200 in a month. The joint parliamentary committee’s report pointed out that, on a particular day in August 2000, Adani Exports shares constituted 96 percent of the trading volume at the National Stock Exchange. Later that year, they accounted for 99 percent of all trades at the Bombay Stock Exchange. At the time, Adani was still a middling player, only importing coal and plastic products while exporting small consumer goods. When confronted by the SEBI, Parekh admitted that the trades had been conducted by his entities but defended himself by saying that the term “circular trading” had not been sufficiently defined by the SEBI.
According to the SEBI’s findings, 14 subsidiaries of the Adani group supplied funds worth over Rs 345 crore to 11 entities associated with Parekh between February and August 2000. The Adani group had argued before the SEBI that it was just raising money for the Mundra port project, but neither the JPC nor the SEBI bought this argument. The Adani companies paid over Rs 25 lakh to the SEBI to settle the case, as did most of the other K-10 companies, and their ban from the stock market was lifted in a year. Recently a Mumbai court acquitted the Adanis in the Serious Fraud Investigation Office’s long-delayed case related to the scam. Parekh himself was back in the news recently, when SEBI banned him for market manipulation soon after his previous 20-year ban had ended.
A key link in the network of entities established by Parekh was Triumph International Finance, three of whose directors were arrested alongside Parekh by the CBI. The SEBI also cancelled Triumph’s registration but later found that the company had circumvented its prohibition on trading Indian securities by incorporating a Dubai-based subsidiary called Jermyn Capital Partners, which was owned by a Mauritian subsidiary, International Holdings (Triumph). Transactions between Triumph’s Indian and Mauritian companies have since been investigated by the ED. While looking through the Mauritian registry, I found that Jugoo and Jingree had been listed as directors of the now defunct International Holdings (Triumph) since 2003 and 2004, respectively. From January 2005, KBTS was the company’s secretary.
A whistleblower complained to the SEBI that, between 2007 and 2009, Jermyn Capital Partners engaged in similar stock manipulation involving the Indian pharmaceutical giant Sun Pharmaceuticals. Instead of stopping circular trading, Parekh had seemingly shifted his operations to London. I also accessed British registry documents that show that, in mid-2022, Jingree was declared the controlling shareholder of the company. From March 2013, Jeremyn—now called Orbit Investment Securities Services—has been controlled by Chagos Investment Limited, registered in the British Virgin Islands. Since July 2010, its ultimate beneficiary has been a “J. Jingree,” while Jayechund’s son Kevin Yasheel Jingree joined as a director in April 2020. Other directors included Dharmesh Doshi and Mihir Kapadia, known associates of Parekh.
Parekh’s associates were also on the board of the Dubai-based Jermyn Capital that had been banned by the SEBI. In 2007, the Economic Times reported that Jermyn Capital had sent $1 million to a pharmaceutical company called Jineshwar Holdings, which was also based in the British Virgin Islands. According to a database maintained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Vinod Adani was a director and shareholder of Jineshwar Holdings.
It appears, therefore, that the Adani group has maintained its association with Doshi and the network—Parekh still denies any association with the companies—long after the 2001 scam, and until rather recently. According to its annual filings, Adani Realty, the group’s real-estate subsidiary, acquired 93,500 shares in the Triumph International in 2016 and continued to hold 1.25 percent of its shares until 2020.
It appears, therefore, that the Adani group has maintained its association with Doshi and Parekh’s network—he still denies any association with the companies—long after the 2001 scam, and until rather recently.
The SEBI had found that a firm called Indsec Securities had worked with Parekh to drive up prices and manipulate stocks. Jingree was a director of Indsec till recently. He is the director of Fednav International, Indsec’s holding company till 2021, while his son joined the board in 2015. Indsec lists as its clients 12 Mauritius-based investors of Adani, some of which are funds and companies that, according to the Hindenburg Research report, have almost exclusively invested in Adani companies. One of them belongs to the Amicorp group, which the Hindenburg credits with working extensively with the Adani group to develop its offshore network. It is clear then that Adani, Parekh’s associates and Jingree worked in tandem both during and after the 2001 scandal. It also gives us the earliest view of Adani’s Mauritius network.
INDIA HAD LITTLE REASON to buy the AgustaWestland EH101 helicopters. They did not meet the country’s requirements, the primary one for VVIP helicopters being that they could climb to an altitude of six thousand metres, allowing ministers and generals to reach strategic locations such as the Siachen glacier. This was shortly after the Vajpayee government had laid out the defence procurement procedure—a thorough system of requirements and regulations to prevent corruption—which the Indian Air Force argued it was following to a tee, leading to AgustaWestland’s disqualification. However, Vajpayee’s office stepped in and lowered the altitude requirement to just below the height the EH101 could reach.
The Indian government’s erratic behaviour on the helicopter deal continued into the Manmohan Singh years. The technical evaluations of the competing helicopters were manipulated, in one instance going so far as to run test flights on other AgustaWestland helicopters and mark their results for the EH101. The pricing bids of competing choppers were not even opened, with the government continuing to favour the EH101 even as its price ballooned to far larger than initially quoted. It became increasingly apparent that there was undue influence behind the preference.
Then, in 2012, the Italian police recorded two businessmen, Guido Ralph Haschke and Carlo Gerosa, discussing how they had routed bribes through Mauritius, that they had a close relationship with the cousin of India’s air chief marshal and that they would be protected by an Indian lawyer who was managing their affairs: Gautam Khaitan. As soon as the news broke, the defence minister, AK Antony, called off the deal and ordered a CBI investigation into the kickbacks. The agency acted quickly, raiding Khaitan’s office and seizing a large trove of files, which evidently showed Khaitan managing several Indian companies as well as passing on instructions from Sushen Gupta to transfer funds between various Mauritian entities. Khaitan’s fingerprints were all over the case, his Defence Colony office serving as an Indian hub—much like 44, Rue St Georges had for the Mauritian functions.
The Italian investigation found that AgustaWestland sent €28 million as kickbacks through Haschke and Gerosa. To launder the money into India in the guise of consultancy contracts, the company seems to have sent it through several entities. The oldest of these is IDS Infotech, a Mohali-based software consultancy. Between 2007 and 2010, IDS Infotech received €2.1 million from AgustaWestland. In June 2008, IDS Infotech created a Tunisian subsidiary, which was handed over to the two Italians. The company received €20.8 million from AgustaWestland. Meanwhile Haschke and Gerosa also became directors of a Chandigarh-based consultancy firm called Aeromatrix Info Solutions. Khaitan was a director of Aeromatrix and IDS Infotech’s legal advisor.
While some of the Tunisian firm’s money came to Aeromatrix, most of it—€12.4 million—went to Interstellar in Mauritius, from where it was routed to India, Singapore, Liechtenstein, the British Virgin Islands and various tax havens. Much of this routing was identified by the ED through various documents found at Khaitan’s office, as well as three thousand pages of company and banking documents it received from the Mauritian authorities. FIDECO was the director of Interstellar when money was transferred to five shell companies that the ED found to be controlled by Sushen Gupta: Sabhah Investments, Lyot Global Business, Asaki Anstalt, Evita Services Corp and Citation SA. And yet, the agencies never seem to have investigated FIDECO itself.
In March 2007, Interstellar agreed to send €160,000 to Sabhah—both companies were registered at 44, Rue St Georges. The transaction was authorised by Ismail Bahemia, a Mauritian national representing both FIDECO and Interstellar’s “sole director,” Kreston, which had the same address. Between January 2006 and February 2008, Interstellar’s board passed resolutions to provide loans worth €7.5 million to Lyot Global Business, also signed by Bahemia and another colleague on behalf of Kreston. In July 2005, Bahemia signed a service agreement between Interstellar and the Liechtenstein-based entity Asaki Anstalt, transferring €100,000 and authorising a monthly payment of €250,000. The instructions for the payment came to FIDECO from Khaitan’s office.
The Interstellar documents that the Mauritian authorities shared with the ED reveal that, under FIDECO’s management, Interstellar also routed kickbacks from several other manufacturers. In February 2004, Interstellar was subcontracted by a Singaporean company called Interdev, which had a purchase agreement with the French company Dassault Aviation, which manufactures the Rafale jet. This agreement was signed by the director of Interdev and Shakil Fakeermahamod, a director of Interstellar at the time.
Many of these contracts were further commissioned to IDS Infotech, the Mohali-based router of AgustaWestland kickbacks. In 2002, Interstellar raised invoices worth at least €174,360 as commission for projects awarded to IDS by Dassault. During this period, Dassault was involved in only one major deal with the Indian government: the September 2000 purchase of ten Mirage jets for Rs 1,500 crore. The opposition had almost immediately protested the deal as the jets—already sold to Jordan, in 1989, for 1.2 billion francs—were being resold to India at a much higher price of 2.1 billion francs, a markup of about Rs 630 crore. Such an unreasonable rise in price for second-hand products was likely because of the influence of intermediaries and kickbacks.
Throughout this period, Interstellar continued to swell with defence kickbacks on 15 deals that I was able to cross-reference between Sushen’s files, the Mauritian bank statements and Interstellar’s company documents. The most recent of these is the 2016 Rafale deal with Dassault, for which the Modi government faced corruption allegations.
Interstellar was also receiving payments from the Ukrainian state-owned defence manufacturer SpetsTechnoExport. The company had agreements for payment of commission with STE—between nine and twenty percent of every deal—which was eyeing contracts for repair and overhaul of Mi-17 helicopters, Mig-21 trainers and AL-31F turbo engines used in the Sukhoi Su-30. Bank statements show Interstellar receiving the payments since at least 2007. At the time, Bahemia was representing the company through Kreston. Mauritian banking documents also indicate that Interstellar was getting kickbacks from the Israeli defence contractor Elbit Systems, likely to develop battlefield surveillance systems. While many of these deals were inked shortly after kickbacks were paid, they remain questionable military decisions. The BSS, for example, was only finally deployed this year, nearly two decades after bribes eased the government to make such purchase agreements.
In 2008, another company, called ML Administrators—which later changed its name to MA Corporate—took over as the managing agent of FIDECO. MA Corporate’s money-laundering reporting officer was the same Shakil Fakeermahamod, who was forced to resign after being investigated by Mauritian authorities. Also, letters authorising payment show Bahemia signing on Interstellar’s behalf as late as 2012. Kreston stayed on as director. This company too appears to be part of the FIDECO group, where Bahemia has been a director since 2000. These documents together point to the role of FIDECO in setting up these Mauritian companies, managing their day-to-day affairs and facilitating the structures through which the payments flowed in and out of Interstellar.
Throughout this period, Interstellar continued to swell with defence kickbacks on 15 deals that I was able to cross-reference between Sushen’s files, the Mauritian bank statements and Interstellar’s company documents. The most recent of these is the 2016 Rafale deal with Dassault, for which the Modi government faced corruption allegations. Instead of investigating these abundant leads, the ED simply narrowed its scope. It never looked into FIDECO or any firm that had managed Interstellar before 2008, focussing only on ML Administrators, which was renamed MA Corporate. It also seems to have wilfully ignored the several changes to the network’s corporate structure after the Italian police raided Gerosa’s house.
Following the raid, Gerosa instructed the Tunisian company to stop all payments to Interstellar. Over the next six months, four bank accounts of Interstellar Technologies were shut down. Several other companies mentioned in this investigation have also shut down since. The registered addresses of MA Corporate and ten other companies managed by it were changed. In November, ML Administrators dissolved Interstellar Technologies. The ED assumes this was the end of the company.
However, documents shared with the agency by the Mauritian authorities suggest that another company with the exact same name, Interstellar Technologies, with the same address, has existed and remained active well after 2012, changing its name to Fibreline Technologies. Its current managing agent is a company called ML Associates, based in Seychelles. Another document shows what appears to be the incorporation of another Interstellar Technologies in Seychelles, in September 2012.
Going after the company, or Sushen himself, would doubtless point to dozens of major defence deals in which kickbacks were paid during the tenure of the Manmohan Singh government, but they would also point to the many deals Sushen has worked on since, the many companies that ought to be blacklisted and the morass of illegalities that was the Rafale deal. My November 2023 cover story for The Caravan had estimated that the 15 deals cost the Indian exchequer an estimated Rs 1.8 trillion, when adjusted for inflation. This is not including those pertaining to the Su-30, Mi-17, MiG-21 and the 2014 Antonov deal, for which there are no verifiable amounts. Of this, roughly Rs 833 billion was during the tenure of the United Progressive Alliance, and Rs 984 billion was under the National Democratic Alliance. Interstellar, Sushen, the CBI, the ED, the DRI and Khaitan did not respond to a detailed questionnaire from The Caravan.
“One of the reasons why the AgustaWestland case is going the way it is, is because the CBI and ED unearthed information which opened a can of worms, pointing to the middlemen’s links to Adani.”
The ED’s final blind spot seems even more deliberate, involving the failure to look into all the transactions of the ADM companies headquartered in Khaitan’s office and the seeming disappearance of Gudami from the investigation. These leads point conclusively towards Adani. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, the journalist, saw the lack of movement in the AgustaWestland case as linked to Adani’s own Mauritius network. He said, “One of the reasons why the AgustaWestland case is going the way it is, is because the CBI and ED unearthed information which opened a can of worms, pointing to the middlemen’s links to Adani.”
IT WAS AS THOUGH the Mauritius network saw the Indian investigation coming and jumped to hide any association with the ADM companies. Just a month before the Mauritian attorney general replied to the Indian letter rogatory, Jingree’s Rogers Capital Corporate Services issued a gazette notification removing ADM Indonesian Holdings, ADM Concentrated Toco and ADM China Corn Holdings from the registry. Jingree had been a director of first two, while the other directors, including Jugoo, were all colleagues. The Mauritian attorney general had agreed to share the documents of the ADM companies with the CBI and the ED at the earliest.
Through these Mauritian companies, ADM owned three Indian subsidiaries: ADM Agro Industries India, ADM Agro Industries Kota and Akola, and ADM Agro Industries Latur and Vizag. Khaitan and three of his employees—Arihant Jain, Manish Kumar Jain and Deepak Goyal—were shareholders and directors of the main company when it was incorporated in 2009. Another subsidiary, ADM Dharwad, had been owned through the Mauritius network, too, but had been merged with it in 2017. Between 1999 to 2013, ADM’s Mauritian subsidiaries invested at least Rs 400 crore in the Indian companies. All four Indian subsidiaries had one thing in common: they had all functioned at different points, between 2009 and 2016, from Khaitan’s Defence Colony office.
But here, too, as in Mauritius, the agencies seem to have been selective about which companies they investigated. Aeromatrix was an obvious choice, as Khaitan’s fellow directors were Haschke and Gerosa. But the ADM companies, whose ownership and transaction history ran parallel, were simply not looked into. Like Aeromatrix, IDS and Interstellar, the ADM companies too had their Indian anchor at Khaitan’s office, and their Mauritian anchor was being managed by Jingree.
There was another inconvenient fact. The ED had seized a laptop belonging to Manish Kumar Jain, who worked in the corporate department of Khaitan’s quietly successful legal practice. The laptop contained several fake invoices and agreements between various foreign companies that, the ED concluded, were meant to cover the transfer of kickbacks from Interstellar to Sushen’s personal shell companies and to Indian companies, through which they could line the pockets of corrupt defence officials and politicians. This included fake invoices that Khaitan’s office was making for a Singaporean company called Gudami International.
The ED and the CBI had stronger reasons to investigate Gudami. Documents shared by the Mauritian authorities revealed that, in April 2008, Interstellar sent Gudami International $250,000—more than Rs 1.08 crore at the time—with an invoice for “consultancy services for various projects.” The CBI and the ED had clearly concluded that Khaitan’s office was preparing fake invoices, and that kickbacks were being transferred out in the name of fake contracts. At the time, Interstellar was receiving kickbacks in several defence deals, and it is unclear which deal would have involved Gudami.
Deepak Goyal, an employee of Khaitan, who was also briefly director of one of the ADM companies, told the CBI that he had signed Gudami’s invoice to Interstellar on his boss’s instructions. Such a large transaction—Rs 1.08 crore is more than several of Sushen’s own Delhi-based companies received from Interstellar—should have been clear grounds for the ED and the CBI to investigate Gudami.
Several companies linked to a separate case involving alleged tax evasion and money-laundering by the Adani group, to the tune of Rs 1,000 crore, while trading diamonds and other gems, were registered at Gudami’s Singapore office, according to documents shared with the DRI by the Indian high commission in Singapore. Adani Export’s 2001 annual report describes Gudami as an “associate entity”—an entity in which the company has a significant influence. Gudami’s director, Chang Chung-Ling, was a shareholder in Adani Power, and the registered address of Adani Global, a Singaporean subsidiary of the Mauritian entity of the same name, was his home address. Chang and Vinod were Adani Global’s directors. According to the Taiwanese publication GVM, they have known each other since 1986, when they began to trade with each other. It describes Chang’s son Chien-Ting as the Adani group’s representative in Taiwan.
Gudami’s transactions with Interstellar were mentioned in the ED’s 2014 and 2017 prosecution complaints for the AgustaWestland case. It has disappeared in the nine subsequent prosecution complaints. ED officials were reportedly planning to visit Singapore in 2016 to investigate the money trail, but no update has been published on the Singaporean angle since. There have been no updates on the other Singaporean companies involved in the money trail, including Interdev—involved, through Sushen, in agreements with Dassault that were likely kickbacks.
Several companies linked to a separate case involving alleged tax evasion and money-laundering by the Adani group, to the tune of Rs 1,000 crore, while trading diamonds and other gems, were registered at Gudami’s Singapore office, according to documents shared with the DRI by the Indian high commission in Singapore.
The diamond and jewellery money-laundering and over-invoicing case was dismissed by the Supreme Court. In early 2020, Gudami was quietly struck off the registry of companies there. The safety of the Singaporean companies has seemingly led to other companies in the network also shifting there. After ADM’s Mauritian companies were dissolved, shortly before files were shared with the ED, the Indian ADM companies were taken over by the group’s Singaporean holdings. “Why do big businesses have links with the politicians? So that, these investigations don’t proceed,” Arun Kumar said. “Even if they proceed, they are not done properly so that they fail. That’s why the SC had called the CBI a caged parrot.”
In 2017, the DRI’s promising power equipment over-invoicing case was dismissed by the customs, excise and service tax appellate tribunal, which ruled out the Adani group’s control over PMC and said that the pricing had been determined “at arm’s length.” The Adani group cited the dismissal of this case by the Supreme Court as well as the exoneration in its response to The Caravan, “These rulings by the highest court in the land have conclusively rejected all allegations of overvaluation, siphoning of funds and related party concerns,” it said. “These final orders also affirm that all transactions were lawful, transparent and conducted strictly within the legal framework.” Regarding coal invoicing, the group said they had furnished documentation to the DRI six years ago and that “Since then, the DRI has not sought any further information, nor has it raised any objections or issued any adverse findings against us.” The group did not respond to any questions about the Mauritian network, Vinod Adani, its relations to Interstellar, or any involvement in the AgustaWestland case. It simply said it sees “no merit in revisiting matters that have already attained finality through the highest levels of judicial scrutiny. A plain reading of your queries betrays an attempt to conflate independent and unrelated events—most of which do not pertain to Adani—to construct a predetermined narrative aimed at damaging our reputation.”
It was only with the Hindenburg Research report and follow-up investigations by Ravi Nair and Adani Watch that the layers of connections between Gudami, PMC and the Adani group became fully clear. PMC Projects was incorporated in April 2005, with 9,999 shares held by the Mauritian PMC, while Malay Mahadevia held the remaining one share. Mahadevia, a childhood friend of Gautam, joined the Adani group in 1992 and has been a close business associate since. “Urbane, articulate and from a family of doctors, with no history in business, Mahadevia is, in many ways, Adani’s alter-ego,” the Economic Times reported, describing him as Gautam’s “right-hand man.” Mahadevia was the CEO of Mundra Port and later became the whole-time director of Adani Ports and SEZ, besides being the CEO of Adani Airport Holdings and a director at Adani Wilmar. He also serves on the board of at least 12 Adani companies, and at a natural-gas company owned by the Gujarat government in which Adani is a minority stakeholder.
Hindenburg pointed out that PMC’s archived website lists no clients but Adani. Hence, its reported revenue of Rs 63.7 billion since 2010 “is mostly attributable to its work with the Adani group.” PMC shared the address of Adani’s corporate office in Ahmedabad and had the same phone number as Mundra International Airport. When the DRI summoned senior PMC officers, most of whom were former employees of Adani companies, it faced a strange situation where senior officers denied having information on key agreements entered into by the company and even any knowledge of the parent company’s ownership pattern. Hindenburg had the same finding. “Many PMC Projects employees seemingly exhibit confusion over whether they work for Adani Group or PMC Projects,” its report noted. Employees conflated both on their LinkedIn profiles, with one associate manager proudly working at “PMC Projects (Adani Group).”
It was only in late 2020, following changes to Indian law, that PMC Projects finally revealed its actual owner in company filings. It listed its only owner as Chang Chien-Ting. A year after PMC’s incorporation, its ownership was transferred to the Singaporean Gudami and then, in 2007, to the Mauritian Gudami. Its Mauritian shadow company PM&C remains active, and its directors include the CEO, operations manager and compliance officer of FIDECO. It remains active in the one address the over-invoicing, money-laundering and circular-trading investigations all seemed to lead back to that one address: 44, Rue St Georges.
ENTERING THE NEW MILLENIUM, Adani Exports’ stock price had nearly doubled, thanks to Parekh’s stock manipulation scam, ensuring that Gautam could enter the big leagues. And he had risen far. In the subsequent two decades, he went on to become the second richest man in the world—with his net worth rising from Rs 5.6 trillion to Rs 12.64 trillion between March and September 2022. To put that in perspective, that is about a third of the total expenditure of the Indian government that year, for every school, hospital, highway, train, tank, fighter jet, nuclear silo and diplomatic visit in the world’s most populous country, for every salary and pension for nearly fifty million government employees. In that year, four of his publicly traded companies had more than doubled in value. Then, January 2023 saw as dramatic a fall as the rise he had seen in January 2000.
Late that month, Hindenburg Research published its report accusing the Adani group of having “engaged in a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades.” Provocatively titled the “largest con in corporate history,” the report analysed several hundred offshore entities tied to the group that had stakes in Adani companies, violating Indian securities laws that mandate that at least a quarter of shares in publicly listed companies be held by the public.
The report meticulously tied together hundreds of previous investigations by the SEBI, the DRI, the ED and the CBI, along with media reports into the Adani group’s financial malpractice, outlining accounting fraud and stock manipulation. Alongside Hindenburg’s red flags about how severely indebted the Adani companies were, investors for the first time had a complete picture of the fragility of the Adani empire. There was an immediate meltdown. Adani stocks crashed by about seventy percent, as the group lost over Rs 400 billion in market capitalisation. Gautam’s own fortune fell by Rs 5.3 trillion.
It was crucial for Adani to show that the group was strong enough to tide the storm. It decided to go ahead with an already planned follow-on public offer of shares—new shares issued by a publicly listed company—worth Rs 20,000 crore in its flagship Adani Enterprises. Till the end of that month, the group continued to call the FPO successful, with purchases from institutional investors and high-net worth individuals who could salvage the situation. But, as February rolled around and share prices continued to plunge, the FPO was aborted and the money was returned.
Nearly all of the Mauritian entities that subscribed to the Adani FPO had some previous link to the Adani group, most through Jingree and Vinod Adani’s Mauritius network. This adds to mounting evidence of flagrant violations of Indian securities laws by the group.
But, in the urge to quickly pull the empire out of crisis, the Adani group had ended up proving many of Hindenburg’s allegations. Thirty-three funds had come to Adani’s rescue during the botched FPO, together investing about Rs 6,000 crore. Thirteen of these funds, which contributed Rs 1,700 crore—about 29 percent—of the anchor round, were based in Mauritius. Forbes and The Morning Context investigated these firms and identified that five of them—accounting for almost half of the Mauritian funds—were linked to Jingree or firms associated with him. Four of the five are also among the clients of Indsec Securities, which the SEBI had found to have been working with Parekh in 2001, meaning the ties between them and Adani stretch much further back than has been previously reported.
The first fund, Ayushmat, is administered by a financial-services firm—Rogers Capital Fund Services, which is, in turn, owned by Jingree’s Rogers Capital Corporate Services. Ayushmat also shares two directors with RCCS. Jingree was appointed the director of the firm managing the second Mauritian fund, Aviator Global. Jingree’s colleagues on the Aviator Global board, meanwhile, are also directors of Fidelis Trust and Capital Services, which manages the three other subscribers to the FPO: Coeus Global Opportunities Fund, Belgrave Investment Fund and Opportunities Fund.
At least three of these companies were already entrenched in the Adani empire, having invested in Adani Green. Another FPO subscriber, Elm Park Fund, was a shareholder since the incorporation of Adani Green in 2015, crucial years for its expansion. According to an indictment by the US justice department, this was when Adani Green began “to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain lucrative solar energy supply contracts with the Indian government, which were projected to generate more than $2 billion in profits after tax over an approximately 20-year period.” The indictment included charges against Gautam, who, it said, had “personally met with an Indian government official to advance the Bribery Scheme,” as well as against his nephew Sagar Adani and six other group officials. Given the figures cited by the justice department, Adani Green, which had commenced operations just four years earlier and hardly had any revenue, would have desperately needed funds coming in from offshore accounts. Polus and Aviator were among these funders. Fidelis’s owners appear to have an old connection with Kapadia—Parekh’s associate—through a company in Cayman Island-where his business activities appear to have shifted since the 2001 scam. According to the Paradise Papers, they were directors of this defunct company where Kapadia was a shareholder.
I found, through Mauritian and Indian corporate filings, that other major shareholders in the group were also managed by Jingree and RCCS. Capital Trade and Investment—a firm that, Hindenburg reported, held “suspiciously concentrated holdings in Adani stocks” and was tied to the web of companies Vinod had cultivated across tax havens—had RCCS as its secretary and management company. Eleven entities, including Capital, accounted for up to a third of the shares in Adani Power. Another foreign portfolio investor of six Adani companies, Polus Global Fund, has Fidelis as secretary.
Hindenburg identified a far shadier company linked to Vinod’s network that, I found, also has ties to Jingree. The report describes Amicorp International as a “worldwide facilitator of the movement of funds with its own bank and investment vehicles which can serve as a wall between markets and ultimate beneficial owners.” Amicorp has been accused by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation of siphoning $4.5 billion in the 1MDB case in Malaysia—the largest corruption case in history when it was revealed. The company established seven promotor entities, 17 offshore shell companies and entities associated with Vinod and three Mauritian offshore shareholding firms of Adani stock. The secretary and management company of Amicorp Capital (Mauritius), in turn, was RCCS, until recently.
Chang Chung-Ling was also found to have been investing during the Adani FPO. The OCCRP traced two of the 13 Mauritian funds—Emerging India Focus Fund and EM Resurgent Fund—to Chang and Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli, an Emirati who was also a long-time associate of the Adani family and a former director of some Adani companies. Ahli had incorporated Electrogen Infra and its parent company in Mauritius. Company filings, bank records and internal emails showed that they had used these funds to trade large amounts of shares in four Adani companies between 2013 and 2018. A company owned by Vinod in Dubai was giving directions on investments from Ahli and Chang’s funds. If the two men are considered to be acting on behalf of the Adani group, their stake in Adani Enterprises would be a flagrant violation of securities law. As these associations became more clear, allegations of round-tripping against the Adani group have become more vociferous.
“Once this black income is generated, a portion of it is taken out abroad through hawala”—an informal system for transferring funds—“and the process of layering,” Kumar told me. “This is done through shell companies in various jurisdictions. You transfer it to one jurisdiction, close the bank account there and transfer it to a second jurisdiction, and a third one. Finally, it might end up in Mauritius, Cayman Islands or Switzerland. From there, you can then round-trip it back to India as investments from Mauritius, Singapore or Cayman Islands.”
The beneficial owner of both these funds is Trident Trust, a company based in the British Virgin Islands. Trident Trust was a key focus of the Pandora Papers investigation, based on leaked documents from corporate service providers in tax havens. It is one of the world’s largest offshore service providers, having operated from tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands, Seychelles and Panama since the late 1970s.
Trident appears to have been managing several companies and funds Adani’s Mauritius network, with the companies of Vinod, Jingree and Sushen meeting again. Interstellar had paid $1.14 million to a Singaporean subsidiary of Trident. Among the documents shared by the Mauritian authorities is an invoice of Trident, from 2012, where $1,070 is paid for the “incorporation of BVI company.” This refers to a company called Pearlfuse Worldwide, which seems to have been struck off the registry in November 2014, after the AgustaWestland deal fell through and the investigation heated up. Based on the Pandora Papers, L’Express reported that the Trident Trust registered in the British Virgin Islands was representing a company whose shares were held by Rogers Capital, whose ultimate beneficiary was Jingree.
“The triad protects itself. Without breaking the triad, you are not going to be able to solve the problem.”
Trident also administers IPE Plus 1, a Mauritian fund investing in Indian equities. Adani Watch found that IPE had received investments worth $100 million from a Mauritian company owned by Electrogen Infra—whose only source of income, according to its own statements, is dividends of its Dubai subsidiary. Vinod, Chang and Ahli had routed funds to Mauritius via a Bermuda-based entity called Global Opportunities Fund to invest in Adani’s Indian stocks. A sub-fund of Global Opportunities also subscribed to IPE Plus 1.
In August 2024, Hindenburg found that the former SEBI chairperson, Madhavi Buch, and her husband were also investors in IPE Plus 1. Shortly before she became a whole-time member at the regulator, her husband had written to Trident to switch the account to his name. Hindenburg found a letter from Buch’s personal email showing that she had redeemed investments worth $872,760 from the account the following year. This was when the DRI investigations into over-invoicing in power equipment and jewellery both began to fall apart. Buch headed the probe into Adani’s Mauritius investors. Her predecessor, UK Sinha, who had overseen the DRI investigation into Adani’s power over-invoicing is now a non-executive chairperson of the Adani group’s biggest television channel. Buch, Trident, Vinod Adani, Indsec, Fidelis, Orbit and Kapadia did not respond to questions.
Most of these findings have come from small understaffed teams who lack the ability to demand company and financial documents in the manner a government agency or a market regulator can. “The data that has come out on this has largely been stolen data,” Arun Kumar said. “It is difficult to track the trail of this layering process. The BVI data, Panama papers, Paradise Island Papers, LGT Bank and UBS Bank were all stolen data. In spite of the double taxation avoidance agreement and tax information exchange agreement, data has not come from there.”
After the failed FPO and the furore over the findings of the Hindenburg report, the SEBI was tasked with investigating the Adani group. It told the Supreme Court that it has finished 24 probes into the irregularities raised by Hindenburg, but none of these findings have been made public. One of the few announcements has been regarding the 13 Mauritian funds that invested in the FPO. The SEBI admitted that it had long suspected several public investors in Adani companies to be possibly “fronts for the promoters of these companies.” However, it claimed to have “drawn a blank” in its attempts to establish the ultimate ownership of the 13 entities. The SEBI had made this task difficult for itself by diluting norms, in 2018, requiring companies to disclose the ultimate beneficial owners of foreign institutional investors.
Emerging India Focus Fund and the Adani companies—Adani Enterprises, Adani Power, Adani Energy Solutions and Adani Ports and SEZ—approached the SEBI to settle the case of violation of public shareholding norms. This follows the pattern of accused companies getting away by paying a paltry sum to reach settlement agreements with the SEBI, as was the case with several companies involved in the 2001 stock market manipulation case.
Kumar had little hope of the investigations succeeding without being accompanied by political change. “Even the stock exchange, ultimately the head of the SEBI, various heads of banks are appointed by the government,” he told me. “All of them look to the government for directions. They won’t intervene unless they get a clearance from the finance ministry or home ministry.” Having studied the phenomenon for years, he noted that dozens of committees and commissions have looked into the issue of black money, making thousands of recommendations—hundreds of which have been implemented. But, he said, “The triad protects itself. Without breaking the triad, you are not going to be able to solve the problem.”