Hello,
Gautam Adani along with seven others was charged in the US over allegations of bribing Indian government officials for power supply deals. While the public debate has been focused on the role of state-level politicians and officials in the Adani bribery scandal, our investigation has revealed that what the US authorities called "The Corrupt Solar Project" originated in a dubious auction that the Union government had scripted to purchase solar power.
The Reporters’ Collective investigation shows the role of the power ministry, renewable energy ministry and one of its arms, SECI, in crafting a solar power auction tailormade for the Adani Group and helping bag contracts for 8 GW of power supply when it had originally bid for only 4 GW of projects.
The solar power auction discouraged competition and paved the way for Adani Group to secure a contract to sell to the states expensive power worth thousands of crores of rupees over the next 25 years.
One of the criteria that shut out the majority of solar power producers was to allow only those companies that also produce solar power components, and called it manufacturing-linked auctions. Very few in India are into both businesses. But Adani Group was certainly one.
The extraordinary auction conditions and a series of exemptions brought in by the ministries and SECI ensured that Adani Group was the dominant player in the competition with just two others in the ring--Azure Power India Limited and Navayuga Engineering Company Limited.
Navayuga Engineering exited the auction after it signed a deal worth thousands of crore of rupees with Adani Group to sell its port in Andhra Pradesh, negotiations for which were going on while the two competed for the solar contract. And Azure Power, now stands accused of colluding with Adani Group to pay bribes of more than Rs 2,000 crore to state government officials to buy the expensive solar power from them through SECI.
Read the investigation by Nitin Sethi and Shreegireesh Jalihal here.