RECORDS SHOW ADANI GROUP’S RISE COINCIDED WITH CONGRESS RULE AT CENTRE

circuit having a storage capacity of 200,000 metric tonnes, aggregating 400,000 tonnes. Kaithal and Monga were the base depots, while the five field depots were at Coimbatore, Navi Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Hooghly.

In 2008, the company acquired coal mines in Bunyu, near the north-east coast of Borneo, Indonesia.

Similarly, during the Congress-led UPA rule, the group acquired the Carmichael coal mines in Australia in 2010. In August 2010, the Adani group signed a US$1.65 billion tripartite deal with the Indonesian government for setting up rail and port infrastructure in South Sumatra. As per the deal, the group received exclusive rights over 60% of the coal reserves in the Bukit Asam province.

In May 2011, Adani Enterprises

announced a $2-billion deal to acquire the Abbot Point Coal Terminal in Australia. In that deal, the Adani group competed with Deutsche Bank’s RREEF Infrastructure, mining major Nathan Tinkler and a Macquarie asset managementled consortium

The group continued its foray into overseas countries in November 2011; it inked a deal with Linc Energy to acquire the Australian company’s coal assets in the Galilee basin, which is located in the state of Queensland.

According to a retired officer of the Indian Administrative Services (IAS), who worked with the Adani group, it would be wrong to say that the Congress leaders during UPA time were antiadani. “We had frequent meetings with them and they would never put any unnecessary hindrance when it came to clearing files. I don’t recall any instance of projects suffering just because it was an Adani project. This narrative of Adani being close to BJP leaders and benefiting from them was limited to sundry political speeches and gossip. After all, the officers concerned in Delhi too were aware of the repercussions of doing something illegal, especially post the coal, 2G and the Commonwealth scams,” the officer recalled.

In fact, among the independent directors on the board for Adani Port is former IAS officer G.K. Pillai, who retired as Home Secretary in June 2011. The Adani group—which was accused of stock manipulation and accounting fraud by a New York-based short-selling entity that also releases “research” reports—according to a present employee, who did not want to be identified considering the current “volatile” situation, has always been a “target’ of US and China-based groups.

“In 2011, just days after we included two cargo vessels— Rahi and Vanshi—for transporting cargo from outside the country, a series of critical stories were done against us by US based media outlets. Much of this was related to business competition and our ability to outbid competitors from the US and China. It was at the time that the narrative of ‘crony capitalism’ was aggressively pushed on the Adani Group. Now we are working in Sri Lanka at places where the Chinese would have been working if we had not got the contracts. Haifa port in Israel is another example of us outbidding global entities, including the Chinese. We have suffered setbacks in the past, many of which were described as permanently crippling for us, but the group has always bounced back,” he said.