Subscribe · Message us securely on Signal

On 10 October, Elon Musk — mid-fight with Reliance over Starlink’s entry into India — jabbed at Mukesh Ambani on X: “Dear Prime Minister Ambani… you are the real boss of India.”

It was meant as an insult. Look at the last twelve months and it stops sounding like one. Keep score.

October 2025. The US sanctions Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two biggest oil companies. India’s largest buyer of their crude is Reliance, whose Jamnagar complex is the biggest single-site refinery on earth. Reliance stops taking the oil.

March 2026. The pressure eases. The US Treasury signs a waiver letting Indian refiners buy Russian crude already at sea — even cargo on blacklisted ships. Within a week it goes global. Reliance goes back to Russian oil. By the July–September quarter, about a third of what Jamnagar refines is still Russian.

Reliance 1, India 0.

Mid-October 2026. Marco Rubio plans the first trip by a US Secretary of State to India with no meetings scheduled in Delhi — the destination is Mumbai and Jamnagar. Washington’s ambassador says India’s foreign minister is “expected” in Mumbai to meet him; Rahul Gandhi says Rubio “summoned his employee to Mumbai.” On 21 October the Ambanis walk Rubio through the Jamnagar refinery.

Reliance 2, India 0.

29 October. Alina Kabaeva’s “Alina” festival opens in Mumbai — its first time in Asia — at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, Reliance the partner. Russian state TV says the invitation came from Mukesh and Nita Ambani, and that Kabaeva’s foundation paid for the flights, hotels and production. Kabaeva — widely reported to be Vladimir Putin’s partner — has been under US sanctions since 2022. Photos from the night show her in the seat next to Mukesh Ambani.

Reliance 3, India 0.

So, in one year: India got the tariffs and a foreign minister told to turn up in Mumbai. Reliance got the waiver, the Secretary of State and the front-row seat — hosting Washington’s man one week and Putin’s circle the next.

Every one of these steps has an innocent answer, and they’re worth saying out loud before anyone cries conspiracy. The waivers were public US policy; Reliance only bought what Washington allowed. Rubio went to Jamnagar for oil — Venezuelan crude, a Reliance refinery planned for Texas — and said so. A cultural partnership isn’t a payment, and it was Kabaeva’s own foundation, not Reliance, that reportedly covered the festival. Pulled apart, each step has a clean explanation.

Put back together, they’re harder to wave away. Sanctions that bit on Russian oil bent for Indian refiners. The most powerful diplomat in the world treated a private refinery as the reason to come and the national capital as optional. And within a week of hosting him, the same family rolled out a stage — and a front-row seat — for someone Washington sanctions as part of Putin’s inner circle, while Delhi was left insisting its own foreign minister hadn’t been summoned to Mumbai.

The questions that would turn this from a pattern into a story are answerable ones. Did anyone working for Reliance push for the March waivers — US lobbying filings would show it. What did Reliance and its cultural centre actually put into the Kabaeva festival beyond a venue and an invitation. And who drew up Rubio’s itinerary, with Delhi left off it. Answer those, and you know whether this is a run of coincidences or simply how power now moves between Washington, Moscow and Mumbai.

Musk meant it as a jibe. On a year of this, the road to India really does seem to run through Jamnagar.

Sources: The Moscow Times / Bloomberg · Oilprice · Al Jazeera · The Wire · The South First / The Hindu · India Today / ANI · 5-TV · Agentstvo · VOA · US Treasury.

Subscribe · Message us securely on Signal · Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Key findings

• A sessions judge bailed Pranab Doley on 29 July 2026. The next day Assam’s Home and Political Department ordered him detained under the National Security Act.

• The High Court reserved judgment on his challenge on 14 October. By the end of October he had spent 111 days in custody, The Wire reported.

• The grounds cite 13 cases and foreign money. His lawyer told The Wire he was acquitted or discharged in 11 of the cases, and the bail judge found nothing hidden in his travel funds.

• The Assam cabinet approved the land lease in 2023 for Jenipro, which it called part of the “Hyatt Group of Hotels”. Jenipro now belongs to Juniper Hotels, whose largest shareholder is a Hyatt subsidiary.

• The state’s forest officer placed the site inside Kaziranga’s proposed eco-sensitive zone, 1.17 km from an animal corridor. The zone has not been notified, Down To Earth reported.

On 14 October 2026, the Gauhati High Court reserved its judgment on Pranab Doley’s challenge to his detention. By the end of that month he had spent 111 days in custody, waiting for the decision, The Wire reported.

Doley has not been convicted of anything. He is not even being held for trial. On 29 July a sessions judge in Golaghat granted him bail in the case he was arrested in. “True public order is achieved not by silencing the affected, but by listening to them,” the judge wrote, as quoted by The Wire.

The next day Assam’s Home and Political Department ordered him detained under the National Security Act. The law lets the government hold a person without charge or trial for up to a year, The Reporters’ Collective reported. The order spoke of a “real and imminent possibility” that he would harm public order and the security of the state, The Week reported.

So the man a judge said could go home is held under a law meant for threats to the state. What he had been fighting is a luxury resort at Inglay Pathar, on Kaziranga’s edge, on land that Adivasi families say is theirs.

From a cabinet decision to a cell

The paperwork begins in 2023. On 29 June that year a company called Jenipro Hotels was incorporated. It took a 99-year lease on 40,134 square metres from the Assam Tourism Development Corporation (ATDC), the state’s tourism company.

The Assam cabinet approved that lease on 25 August 2023. Its decision, still on the chief minister’s website, describes Jenipro as “a group entity of Saraf Hotel Enterprises (Hyatt Group of Hotels)”.

The Assam cabinet’s decision of 25 August 2023 calls Jenipro part of the “Hyatt Group of Hotels”. Source: cm.assam.gov.in.

A month later, on 23 September, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced a five-star hotel near Kaziranga, to be built by the Hyatt group for Rs 100 crore. The government signed the MoU that day, Northeast Live reported.

The land came from Golaghat district. A December 2024 RTI reply shows the district administration allotted 30 bighas to ATDC, which handed it to the Saraf group, The Reporters’ Collective reported. The clearing began on 7 June 2024, when the administration demolished an Adivasi farmer’s house. Forty-five Adivasi families say they hold ownership documents for the land.

The state calls it government land cleared of encroachment. Yet ATDC’s own RTI reply classified the parcel as “government periodic patta”, a title that carries heritable rights.

From December 2025 the Golaghat administration took Rs 3 lakh cheques from the Chief Minister’s relief fund to the farmers, Down To Earth reported. Residents said nobody told them in writing what the money was for, and several families refused it. On 1 June 2026 the Gauhati High Court issued notice to ATDC on a petition by 20 of the families.

One resident told The Reporters’ Collective that a survey was done without notice on 24 June, and that construction material was then dumped on their land. On 28 June about 50 people met near the site. Police say they then entered the “ATDC Hyatt project” premises, Arunachal Times reported.

Doley was picked up by police in Guwahati on 12 July. He was held for 18 hours before the arrest was made formal, The Reporters’ Collective reported, and he says he was shown no warrant. Four other activists were arrested in the same case.

On 15 July Sarma spoke in the Assembly. “Instead of the government needing to arrest them, the leftists should have taken the initiative to get a five-star hotel here,” he said, as reported by The Reporters’ Collective.

Two days later UN human rights experts called for the defenders’ release if they were held “solely” for peacefully exercising their rights. They asked Assam to “suspend any land acquisition or development” until the communities had given their free, prior and informed consent.

UN experts ask Assam to suspend land acquisition until the communities consent. Source: OHCHR press release, 17 July 2026.

On 29 July Additional Sessions Judge N.M. Abdullah Ahmed granted Doley bail on a Rs 20,000 surety. He never walked out. The detention order is dated 30 July and was served on him that day, and the grounds followed on 31 July. His family received the papers that afternoon, while the bail formalities were being completed.

His representation against the detention, dated 14 August, was rejected by an order of the same date. He took the case to the High Court, which issued notice on 27 August. On 14 September the state said its affidavit was ready, and the court gave it until 22 September to file. On 14 October the court reserved judgment.

The High Court’s order of 27 August 2026 records the detention order, the grounds and the rejected representation. Source: W.P.(Crl.) 40/2026.

What the state alleges, and what the judge found

The detention order cites a report by Golaghat’s senior superintendent of police and says ordinary criminal law was not enough to stop Doley, Northeast Now reported. The grounds list 13 criminal cases since 2017 and allege foreign remittances. The order speaks of “suspicious foreign transactions from doubtful sources” and complains that it has no details of who paid for his trips abroad, The Reporters’ Collective reported.

His lawyer, Dipesh Agarwala, told The Wire that Doley has been acquitted or discharged in 11 of those 13 cases. The case behind his July arrest had already been weighed by the sessions court when it bailed him.

That court had looked at the money too. Doley may have received funds for his travel abroad as an activist, the judge said, but nothing was hidden. He had already spent seven days in custody, so the question of him fleeing did not arise. The judge noted the defence’s point that police could follow the money through a “document-based investigation” without keeping him in jail, The Reporters’ Collective reported.

The judge also tested the police account of 28 June. The state had called Doley one of the “masterminds of the riot”. The videos did not show protesters directly attacking officers, and no deadly weapons were recovered, The Wire reported from the order. Police said the crowd tried to set a cement mixer on fire. The footage showed a woman pouring diesel on it, the court noted, but no attempt to light it.

No document states why the state moved within a day of the bail. The record does show what Doley stood for. He is the convenor of the Greater Kaziranga Land and Human Rights Protection Committee, which speaks for residents of more than 100 villages around the park. He is secretary of a farmers’ and workers’ union, the Jeepal Krishak Shramik Sangha. In 2021 he stood against minister Atul Bora for the Bokakhat seat and came second.

The day after Doley’s arrest, Bora said the affected families had accepted a rehabilitation package. Residents said about seven cheques had been handed out, The Wire reported.

The government and the companies

The Assam government’s hand is on every step. Its cabinet approved the lease and its chief minister announced the deal. In August 2024 Sarma called reports placing the hotels in eco-sensitive zones “assumptions”, and said the sites were “far from the national park”. The government had “almost begged” companies to come, he added.

Its Golaghat administration allotted the land, cleared it and brought the cheques. That administration has said the transfer to ATDC happened in November 2022 under the watch of Atul Bora, Down To Earth reported. Its Home and Political Department, through commissioner and secretary Diganta Borah, signed the detention order.

Juniper Hotels bought all of Jenipro for about Rs 2.75 crore. One seller was Juniper Investments, a Juniper promoter, which made it a related-party deal. The purchase closed on 18 March 2025. Juniper’s August 2026 presentation describes the plot as “allotted by government at a reasonable rate to promote tourism”, and budgets Rs 200 crore to build there. Its May presentation says the hotel will sit “at a very close proximity to the National Park”.

The Saraf family’s Saraf Hotels, registered in Mauritius, holds 34.64% of Juniper. Arun Kumar Saraf chairs the company and Varun Saraf is its chief executive. Neither Juniper nor the Saraf Group answered the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre’s questions about the arrests.

Hyatt is Juniper’s largest shareholder. Its Mauritius subsidiary, Two Seas Holdings, holds 38.76%, an interest Hyatt’s annual report values at $92 million. Two Hyatt senior vice presidents, David Peters and Elton Wong, sit on Juniper’s board.

Juniper’s promoters at 30 September 2026: Two Seas Holdings 38.76%, Saraf Hotels 34.64%. Source: BSE shareholding pattern.

Hyatt’s statements about the project do not match the paperwork around it. The cabinet had called Jenipro part of the “Hyatt Group of Hotels” in 2023. In June 2024 Hyatt told the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre it was “not planning to construct a hotel at Hathikuli Inglay Pothar”. A month later a Hyatt spokesperson told Mongabay-India that Hyatt had no projects in Kaziranga.

Hyatt in June 2024: “not planning to construct a hotel at Hathikuli Inglay Pothar”. Source: Business & Human Rights Resource Centre.

On 21 May 2026 Juniper’s board told the stock exchanges that the land was earmarked for “a 115-key ALILA luxury resort by Hyatt”. The investor presentation filed that day gave the “Proposed Brand” as “ALILA (By Hyatt)”. Alila is one of Hyatt’s luxury brands.

Juniper’s board filing of 21 May 2026: “a 115-key ALILA luxury resort by Hyatt”. Source: NSE filing, p. 22.

Then Doley was arrested. On 21 July Hyatt told the centre that it “has not entered into any agreement to brand or operate” the project. In the same letter it confirmed a “non-controlling ownership interest” in Juniper.

Hyatt’s letter of 21 July 2026 to the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre.

Juniper’s next filings dropped the name. The AGM notice of 3 August describes “a 106-key a luxury resort” due by 2029-30, with no Alila and no Hyatt. The 17 August presentation leaves out the brand as well. The filings give no reason for the change.

Juniper’s AGM notice of 3 August 2026: the same project, no brand and a later date. Source: NSE filing, p. 14.

Others hold shares along the chain. At 30 September 2026 Juniper’s public holders above 1% were quant Mutual Fund, Aditya Birla Sun Life Insurance, Bandhan Small Cap Fund, The Prudential Assurance Company, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance and M&G Asian Fund. Hyatt is controlled by Pritzker family trusts. Its largest outside holders include Baron Capital, BlackRock, Principal and Wellington.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund held 2.13% of Juniper in September 2025. By 31 December 2025 the stake was gone, about seven months before the arrests. Its data gives no reason, and in June 2026 the fund still held Hyatt shares.

What is at risk

Kaziranga has been a World Heritage Site since 1985. It holds the world’s largest population of one-horned rhinoceroses. The 2022 census counted 2,613 rhinos in the park, out of 4,014 greater one-horned rhinos counted worldwide. It is also a tiger reserve with one of the highest tiger densities in India, and UNESCO says it needs its link to the Karbi Anglong hills kept open.

In an interim order of April 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that “no new construction shall be permitted” on private land in the nine animal corridors around the park. Assam notified those corridors in 2022.

The Supreme Court’s interim order of 12 April 2019 bars new construction on private land in the nine corridors. Source: W.P.(C) 202/1995, pp. 7-8.

The state’s own forest officer told the National Green Tribunal that the Inglay Pathar plot is not in a notified corridor. He put it about 1.17 km from the Haldhibari corridor and 7.17 km from the park, inside the area Assam has proposed as Kaziranga’s eco-sensitive zone.

The Assam Tribune, quoting WWF-India, described the Haldhibari corridor as including part of the Hatikhuli tea estate, which the site adjoins. Down To Earth puts the site about two kilometres from the park’s core habitat. Locals call the land a grazing ground for wild elephants, The Wire reported.

The forest officer’s figures, as quoted by the tribunal: 7.17 km from the park, 1.17 km from the Haldhibari corridor. Source: NGT judgment, 14 February 2025, p. 10.

That eco-sensitive zone, the buffer that limits building around a protected area, has not been notified. In November 2024 the environment ministry and the tiger authority told the tribunal that Kaziranga had no tourism plan, no tiger conservation plan and no such zone, Down To Earth reported. The ministry said no new tourism infrastructure should come up around a tiger reserve until a tourism plan is approved.

The tribunal had taken up the matter on its own. On 14 February 2025 it dismissed the case as “at this stage premature”. Assam had told it that no detailed project report for the hotel had been filed, and that its zone proposal of 6 May 2024 was “pending consideration”.

The tribunal finds the concerns “at this stage premature”. Source: NGT judgment, 14 February 2025, p. 13.

For the families, the risk is the land itself. Since the families went to court, one of the farmers told Down To Earth, the area has been fenced and structures built to house police. Doley’s committee says no environmental or social impact assessment, and no wildlife board approval, has been disclosed for the project.

The right to object is at stake too. The UN experts reminded companies of their responsibility for ensuring “that those who raise concerns are not subject to reprisals”. More than 60 movements and rights groups demanded that the detention order be withdrawn, and thousands marched in Bokakhat for his release.

Even a family visit took a court order. Doley’s father went to Golaghat jail on 31 July and was sent away to seek the district magistrate’s permission. His applications went unanswered until a High Court judge, on 7 August, directed the jail to let him and Doley’s lawyer in.

The resort has not waited. In August Juniper told its investors that site works had begun, and at the end of October locals told The Wire the boundary walls were almost complete. Doley is still waiting for the judgment the High Court reserved on 14 October.

The cost of a luxury property is the destruction of an UNESCO world heritage site. Putting the rhino’s and other wildlife at risk, displacing and threatening the lives and livelihood of indigenous people, and illegal detention of an indigenous activist and leader.

The documents behind this story — add your DocumentCloud link

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

_{Originally published in The News Minute on July 31, 2025. By Anand Mangnale and Maria Teresa Raju. https://www.thenewsminute.com/news/the-states-fall-men-how-police-impunity-ruined-13-lives-after-the-mumbai-train-blasts}

On July 21, after nearly two decades of incarceration, 12 men accused in the 2006 Mumbai train blasts were finally set free. Of the 12, five men were on the death row, while seven were serving life sentences. Wahid Sheikh, another accused, had been earlier set free after nine years in prison. Their acquittal shows the collapse of a case that was built by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) on a foundation of torture, fabricated evidence, and forced confessions.

This is the story of how 13 men were systemically framed to solve a high-profile terror attack, while the real perpetrators’ confessions were ignored to protect the conspiracy, and the ‘reputation’ of the Maharashtra police.

In the wake of their acquittal, I look at how the Maharashtra police and the ATS tailored this ‘narrative’. I rely on publicly available case documents, research, and conversations with the affected men and their families to trace the two-decade long injustice. I have spoken with Wahid several times over the last half decade, researched the entire case through court filings, chargesheets, and judgements. I also have access to testimonies of all the victims through colleagues who were researching the blasts with me.

Arrests on manufactured–read Muslim–grounds

Eighteen years ago, on July 11, 2006, seven blasts killed over 200 people in the first class compartments of Mumbai’s suburban local trains. The ATS soon launched an operation and rounded up numerous individuals. The reasons for their arrests were arbitrary, based on a conspiracy that targeted their Muslim identities.

The ATS alleged that blasts were executed by the 13 arrested men, who were an “Indian terror cell working with Pakistani handlers” and funded from overseas. The men were Kamal Ahmed Ansari, Tanveer Ahmed Ansari, Faisal Shaikh, Ehtesham Siddiqui, Majid, Shaikh Mohammed Ali Alam, Sajid Ansari Marghoob, Abdul Wahid Shaikh, Muzammil Shaikh, Suhail Shaikh, Zameer Ahmed Shaikh, Naveed Husain Khan, and Asif Khan Bashir Khan.

As per the ATS’ narrative, the bombs were assembled in seven pressure cookers at the residence of Mohammad Ali Alam in Govandi, with the help of 11 Pakistanis who secretly stayed there. To establish the motive of religious extremism, the ATS misinterpreted a religious text message from Kamal Ansari as a ‘sinister’ code. The ATS connected these individuals who had never met until then and assigned them roles in a conspiracy. The evidence and the HC judgement clearing the men shows that this was fabricated and that they were actually never involved in the blasts.

Kamal Ahmed Ansari, the first suspect picked up, was arrested from his village in Bihar seven days after the blasts, on July 18. The primary evidence cited against him by the ATS was a text message he had sent to his brother-in-law, which, they claimed, “reeked of religious extremism”.

The text had said, “May Allah, the Almighty grant you patience as that of Hazrat Ayyub (A.S.)! May you have beauty as that of Hazrat Yousuf (A.S.)! May you are endowed with faith as that of Hazrat Ibrahim (A.S.)! May you are crowned with an obedient son like that of Hazrat Ismail (A.S.)! May you are blessed with noble character as that of Hazrat Muhammad (S.A.W.)!” (sic)

Ansari maintained that he was not even in Mumbai on the day of the blasts. In fact, he was in his village on July 10 and had crossed into Nepal for a few hours on July 11—a fact recorded in Nepal’s official BHANSAR register. The ATS was accused of concealing his call data records (CDR), which would have proven his location.

Mohammad Ali Alam was picked up from his house a couple of days after the blasts, for what the police described as a brief inquiry with Inspector Vijay Salaskar. His wife, Saidunnisa, recounted that the “brief inquiry” stretched out into two months of illegal detention before a chargesheet was finally prepared.

Faisal Shaikh, an engineering dropout who was trying to run a small business in Mumbai, was arrested on July 19. It didn’t stop there—the Maharashtra police, in their wisdom, decided to charge an entire family.

Faisal’s younger brother Muzammil Shaikh was arrested a month later from his new job at Oracle in Bangalore, despite not being in Mumbai at the time of the blasts. Their third brother, Rahil, who had been in London since a year, was also named as an absconding accused.

Police torture and coerced confessions

With no actual evidence at hand against the suspects, the ATS resorted to extreme torture to fabricate a case from scratch. This is made evident by the case documents, accused’s statements, lawyers filings, and the accounts of the accused, which paint a horrifying picture of their time in custody. Following his release, Wahid also wrote the book Begunah Qaidi, in which he detailed the case and his life in jail.

Systemic torture

Kamal Ahmed Ansari says that he was inflicted with third-degree torture at the Chandan Chowki and Kala Chowki ATS units. Tanveer Ahmed Ansari names specific police officials who subjected him to third-degree torture and threatened to kill him if he spoke to the judge.

Faisal Shaikh was subjected to “Chinese water torture,” which resulted in him developing a brain tumour. Ehtesham Siddiqui, another accused, was mercilessly beaten, had his palms and soles pinned to the floor, and was given electric shocks to his private parts.

In journalist and author Josy Joseph’s book The Silent Coup, Wahid recalled the questioning tactics:

“The policemen pulled out a bottle of Surya Prakash oil—an Ayurvedic mix of oils extracted from eucalyptus, clove, mint and camphor—prescribed for pain relief. But in the interrogation rooms of the ATS, the oil was not being put to use as a tool in the war on terror.

The team thrust a tube into Wahid’s rectum and injected the oil into his body. Within a few minutes, his body was on fire. He started jumping.”

All 13 men were tortured and coerced to give fake statements against themselves.

Threats against families

A common tactic allegedly used by the ATS was to threaten the families of the accused. ATS chief KP Raghuvanshi allegedly threatened to implicate Kamal Ansari’s family. Faisal Shaikh was warned that the women in his family would be raped and his father implicated if he didn’t cooperate. These are just a few instances.

Forced confessions

Under duress, the accused were forced to sign blank or pre-written papers. In fact, Faisal had been threatened by ATS ACP Singhal that they would “rape the women in his family and implicate his father in the case” if he tried to prove his innocence. When he was taken to DCP Brijesh Singh to sign the false confessions, Faisal recounts being told by the DCP that they were “working under a lot of pressure” and that Faisal had “no choice” but to sign the confession.

Tanveer Ansari retracted his forced confession in court, but the ATS defied a judge’s order for a medical check-up and took him directly to jail, where he was beaten further.

This allegedly went on for years.

Fabricated evidence, tutored witnesses

The case relied heavily on evidence that was fabricated. We examine some instances of it in this report.

The cooker story

Two months after his arrest, the ATS seized a single pressure cooker from Mohammad Ali Alam’s home in Govandi. “They took a cooker from our house. They couldn’t find anything else. They later alleged that we used to make bombs in this cooker,” Alam’s wife had testified. However, when they spoke to the media, the ATS claimed that they had found seven cookers used for making bombs at his home. His wife and brother said the police’s claims that the 11 alleged Pakistani terrorists stayed in their tiny, crowded house to build bombs was false—something like that would have been impossible to hide from their neighbours, they said.

False witnesses

Several witnesses were allegedly brought from far-off locations and tutored by the ATS.

In Tanveer Ansari’s case, a false punchnama was prepared with a panch (witness) who was later revealed to have served as a witness in other police cases as well. It’s a police technique that is used even today, with witnesses on the police’s payroll.

In Majid Shafi’s case, his business partner Mohammed Shakeel was intimidated into testifying against him, falsely stating that Majid hosted Pakistanis and helped them cross the border. Shakeel later told his family he was tortured and forced to lie.

A generation of stolen lives

In the two decades since their arrests, the accused and their families faced financial, emotional, and physical difficulties.

Tanveer Ansari’s mother died from the shock of his arrest; he was granted only 90 minutes of parole for her funeral despite a court order prescribing five hours.

Majid Shafi’s wife Farzana developed multiple organ failure and kidney disease due to the stress, and was left to raise their daughter in poverty, telling her school that her father worked in the Gulf to hide the truth.

Indian Mujahideen’s confession ignored

The most glaring contradiction in the ATS’ case emerged in September 2008, when the Mumbai Crime Branch arrested the terror group Indian Mujahideen’s (IM) co-founder Sadiq Sheikh. While the ATS was busy in building its fake conspiracy and chain of evidence along with tortured confessions, Sheikh gave a video confession in February 2009, taking responsibility for the train blasts.

Sheikh described the entire plot in detail, including how five IM members, including himself, Atif, and Abu Rashid, planned the attack. He explained how they rented a flat in Mumbai’s Sewri, how another IM co-founder, Riyaz Bhatkal, arranged for 35-37 kg of explosives from Mangaluru, and how they purchased cookers and bags in Mumbai.

He gave a step-by-step account of how the seven cookers were filled with explosives on the morning of July 11, the timers were set, and planted one by one in the first class compartments of different western line suburban local trains to cause mass casualties during evening peak hours.

Despite this detailed confession from the leader of a known terror outfit, the ATS, led by KP Raghuvanshi, publicly insisted that the 13 men they had arrested were the real culprits and there was “enough evidence” against them.

It is interesting to note that the Mumbai Crime Branch made no noise around this. The crime branch, then led by Rakash Maria, must have been protecting their colleagues from the ATS, instead of the pursuit of Justice.

Even when police officers privately admitted to the accused and their families that they knew they were innocent but were being “pressured into framing them,” the official narrative never changed. Sadiq Sheikh later retracted his confession, a move clearly orchestrated by authorities to avoid discrediting the ATS’s entire case and to keep the 13 men in prison.

ATS ACP’s alleged suicide

While this was going on, Vinod Bhatt, an ATS Assistant Commissioner of Police who was in charge of the case, allegedly died by suicide on August 29, 2006.

During the investigation, Bhatt had summoned Wahid to his office at the ATS station in Bhoiwada. Ehtesham Siddiqui, another accused, was also present in the room.

Wahid said that Bhatt had told them that he had looked through all the documents and statements, and had come to the conclusion that they were innocent. Wahid remembered Bhatt saying he was under pressure from Mumbai Police Commissioner AN Roy and ATS chief KP Raghuvanshi to file charge sheets against them. He said that Bhatt also alleged that the 13 men were caught as the ATS didn’t know who the real culprits were.

In The Silent Coup, we are given a glimpse into their conversation:

“Ehtesham: We have always said that we are innocent. Why were we arrested?

Bhatt: Because we haven’t found the real culprits.”

Bhatt reportedly assured Wahid and Ehtesham that he would rather die than let innocent people fall. He said:

“Ehtesham: Will we be released from this case?

Bhatt: Have faith in Allah, I will die but not let innocent people fall.”

On November 3, 2006, an unsigned letter addressed to the President of India detailed how several ATS officers were being coerced by seniors, namely AN Roy and KP Raghuvanshi, to arrest and build fake evidence against the 13 men in the blast case. The letter also alleged that Bhatt died by suicide due to this pressure.

The anonymous letter addressed to the President of India

Maharashtra’s police State revival

The acquittal of these men momentarily closes a painful chapter for them.What should now follow is a chapter of serious and unbiased inquiry into police impunity, misconduct, and criminal conspiracy—an investigation into the investigators, into a system that labelled innocents as terrorists for decades and faced no consequences.

While these officials get to retire with benefits, live a lavish life, or take on post retirement jobs, their conspiracy ruined innumerable lives.

It is also crucial to call it out now, as the Maharashtra government led by Devendra Fadnavis is set to challenge the Bombay High Court order clearing these 12 men and has already appealed in the Supreme Court. An inquiry into the officers is important, especially at a time when the Maharashtra government is pushing through the draconian Special Public Security Bill that will vest more impunity and opacity in the state and police.

The Bill is a furthering of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’ fight against the “new kind of terror” led by “urban Maoist networks” that ‘brainwash’ youth, professionals, and civil servants. “Maoists are trying to brainwash the youth of the urban areas and make them stand up against the democratic system of the country,” he said.

The Bill’s statement of objects said, “The menace of Naxalism is not only limited to remote areas of the Naxal-affected states, but its presence is increasing in urban areas too, through the Naxal front organisations”.

The new law will further embolden the suppression of free speech, crush dissent, and help the State create more ‘fall men’, who wouldn’t necessarily be just Muslims anymore.

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

_{Originally published in The News Minute (Project Electoral Bond) on March 27, 2024. By Ragamalika Karthikeyan, Anand Mangnale, Neel Madhav — Project Electoral Bond. https://www.thenewsminute.com/news/bharti-groups-rs-150-crore-bond-donation-to-bjp-coincided-with-modi-governments-telecom-u-turn}

In 2012, when the Supreme Court cancelled 122 telecom licences allotted by the Congress-led government, ordering that telecom spectrum be auctioned instead, media reports hailed the verdict as “a decisive blow against corruption”. The court order in what was popularly called the 2G spectrum scam contributed dramatically to the anti-corruption movement that propelled Narendra Modi to power.

More than a decade later, the Modi government laid the ground for a new revolutionary step in India’s telecom growth: using satellites to provide broadband services.

But despite the Supreme Court’s 2012 order calling for the compulsory auction of spectrum, the Modi government decided to adopt the same route taken by the Congress: discretionary allotment of spectrum.

In December 2023, it hurried a new telecom law through Parliament that allowed satellite spectrum to be assigned through an administrative order, doing away with the need for competitive auctions. It also filed a reference to the Supreme Court seeking judicial approval for the move away from auctions.

In the run-up to the new law, only one company cleared the first two hurdles in getting satellite spectrum. OneWeb India received both the licence and the space authorisation required to apply for the spectrum.

OneWeb India is the Indian subsidiary of international satellite company Eutelsat OneWeb, headquartered in London. The largest shareholder of Eutelsat OneWeb is telecom service provider Airtel’s parent company Bharti Enterprises, a multinational conglomerate headquartered in Delhi, with interests in a diverse range of industries such as telecom, digital infrastructure, space communications, financial services and real estate.

On August 24, 2021, OneWeb became the first company to receive a Global Mobile Personal Communications by Satellite or GMPCS licence from the Department of Telecommunications.

On November 21, 2023, it was granted authorisation by the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre, IN-SPACe, for the use of satellite capacity – the only company to receive this authorisation so far.

These two steps are among the prerequisites for applying for spectrum for satellite-based broadband services.

In a press release, the firm said: “Eutelsat OneWeb is ready to deploy as soon as it receives the final spectrum authorization to launch commercial services.”

While the satellite spectrum is yet to be allocated by the government, recently released data on electoral bonds raises troubling questions. It shows that the Bharti group donated Rs 150 crore to the Bharatiya Janata Party through two sets of bonds purchased before and after the government introduced the new law that does away with the need for auction of satellite spectrum – and merely a month after the government granted OneWeb the space authorisation required to get the spectrum.

Investigative journalism takes time. Support us. Besides Bharti Enterprises, Eutelsat OneWeb shareholders include the UK government, French Satellite provider Eutelsat, and Japanese investment bank SoftBank. Given the stringent anti-graft norms in these countries, transparency experts say the disclosures related to electoral bonds could have a wider impact abroad.

“It is fair to say that if Eutelsat OneWeb was aware of the purchase of electoral bonds by Bharti and their donation to the BJP, that would raise serious questions about their potential criminal liability under the UK Bribery Act,” said Kush Amin, a Legal Specialist at Transparency International.

The 2023 telecom bill

From homegrown telecom giants like Reliance Jio to foreign players like Elon Musk’s Starlink, several companies are vying for the satellite spectrum in India.

The Modi government began a public consultation in April 2023 for how this spectrum should be allocated. Two companies – Reliance Jio and Vodafone India – advocated for an auction to be held, while others including Bharti, Amazon, and Starlink, argued against it.

In its submission, Bharti said that “auctioning the satellite spectrum is neither reasonable nor just or fair” as satellite spectrum is a shared resource. Bharti argued that auctioning would make spectrum an exclusive resource and allow competitive forces to block or hoard spectrum capacity.

Reliance Jio’s submission stated that “it is crucial to ensure that spectrum assignment rules for networks offering competing services are uniform and fair, without granting any stakeholder preferential treatment”. It argued that the auctioning of spectrum was “the sole viable strategy to guarantee a balanced competitive landscape amongst competing providers”.

According to media reports, Reliance also submitted a legal opinion by a former Supreme Court judge, Justice KS Radhakrishnan, one of the judges who had heard the 2G spectrum case. Radhakrishnan said that auctioning was “the only permissible mode of allocating spectrum for satellite-based communications”. He pointed out that there was no discernible difference between satellite and terrestrial spectrum, and therefore, the same process should apply to both.

Neither the retired judge’s opinion, nor the Supreme Court order for mandatory auction of spectrum, had any impact on the Modi government.

On December 18, 2023, a new Telecommunications Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha. The Bill not only has draconian powers for internet suspension and surveillance, but also transforms India’s approach to spectrum management, paving the way for the administrative allocation of spectrum for “certain satellite-based services” as opposed to companies being made to compete for it through an auction.

The Bill states: “The Central Government shall assign spectrum for telecommunication through auction except for entries listed in the First Schedule for which assignment shall be done by administrative process.” The First Schedule includes Global Mobile Personal Communication by Satellites, or GMPCS – the licence already acquired by OneWeb.

Defending the Bill in Parliament, telecom minister Ashwani Vaishnaw said: “Across the world, satellite spectrum has been allocated administratively. Nowhere has it been auctioned.”

With 143 Opposition MPs suspended from both houses, the Bill was passed by voice vote on December 20 in Lok Sabha. A day later, Rajya Sabha passed the Bill. On Christmas eve, the President signed the Bill into law.

Even as the government pushed through the new Bill, it moved the Supreme Court asking it to “issue appropriate clarifications that the government may consider the assignment of spectrum through an administrative process”.

Bonds worth Rs 150 crore

In the run-up to the law, away from the public arena, another set of events unfolded.

On November 9, Bharti Airtel Limited bought electoral bonds worth Rs 100 crore, and donated the entire amount to the BJP. Four days later, on November 13, the BJP encashed all the bonds.

Eight days later, on November 21, as mentioned earlier, OneWeb became thefirst company to get satellite authorisation from India’s space regulator. With this, it became the only company qualified to get satellite spectrum from the government.

As the new year began, the Bharti Airtel Limited bought another Rs 50 crore worth of electoral bonds, which the BJP encashed on January 12.

For Eutelsat OneWeb, getting both the licence and space authorisation from the government gives it a first-mover advantage in the satellite broadband industry. Although Reliance Jio also received the GMPCS licence from the Department of Telecommunications in 2022, it is still awaiting space authorisation, according to media reports.

The beneficiary

OneWeb – which is now Eutelsat OneWeb – is a satellite company founded by an American entrepreneur in 2012. After it declared bankruptcy in 2020, it was taken over by Bharti Enterprises and the UK government for US$ 1 billion.

In November 2020, Bharti Global owned a 42% stake in the company, the UK government another 42%. By June 2021, the shareholding pattern changed with French satellite service provider Eutelsat and Japanese multinational company SoftBank coming on board.

In September 2023, Euteslat and OneWeb merged. “OneWeb will be a subsidiary operating commercially as Eutelsat OneWeb with its centre of operations remaining in London,” apress release by Eutelsat said.

As of March 18, 2024, Bharti is the largest shareholder of Eutelsat OneWeb with 23.8%, according to the Eutelsat OneWeb website. The UK government owns 10.9% of the company, Bpifrance 13.6%, and SoftBank 10.8%.

Journalism isn’t PR. Support us. The ownership pattern creates “the potential liability of the parent company, Eutelsat, if it can be shown that they were aware of the donations by Bharti to the BJP”, said Kush Amin, Legal Specialist at Transparency International, referring to the French entity.

Bonds, trusts and Bharti Airtel

Bharti Enterprises has used two means to formally fund Indian political parties: electoral bonds and electoral trusts. An electoral trust is a non-profit entity through which

corporations and individuals can route their donations to political parties while enjoying tax exemptions and remaining semi-anonymous.

The biggest electoral trust in the country, called the Prudent Electoral Trust, was started in 2013 by the Bharti group, which continues to be one of its biggest donors.

Prudent has consistently given most of its donations to the BJP. In 2019, when the BJP returned to power with a larger majority, Prudent donated almost Rs 218 crore to the party. That year, Bharti had donated Rs 27.25 crore to Prudent.

In the same year, Bharti gave Rs 51.4 crore to the BJP through electoral bonds, along with Rs 8 crore to the Congress, Rs 1 crore each to Janata Dal (United) and Shiromani Akali Dal, Rs 50 lakh to the National Conference, and Rs 10 lakh to the Rashtriya Janata Dal.

In the next year, Bharti donated Rs 10 crore to Prudent, but did not buy any electoral bonds.

The group gave Rs 35 crore to the BJP through bonds in both 2021 and 2022.

The number suddenly went up to Rs 100 crore in 2023 – all of which was purchased days before Eutelsat OneWeb got its broadband deal.

In fact, Bharti Enterprises, the biggest shareholder in Eutelsat OneWeb, is also one of the biggest buyers of electoral bonds.

Between 2019 and 2024, group companies Bharti Airtel Limited, Bharti Infratel Limited, and Bharti Telemedia Limited purchased bonds worth Rs 247 crore, donating Rs 236.4 crore – or over 95% – to the ruling BJP, an analysis of electoral bonds data released by the Election Commission shows.

Project Electoral Bond has contacted Bharti Enterprises, Eutelsat OneWeb, SoftBank, as well as the Union Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and the UK government for their response. This report will be updated if and when they respond.

This report is part of a collaborative project involving three news organisations – Newslaundry, Scroll, The News Minute – and independent journalists.

Project Electoral Bond includes Aban Usmani, Anand Mangnale, Anisha Sheth, Anjana Meenakshi, Ayush Tiwari, Azeefa Fathima, Basant Kumar, Binu Karunakaran, Dhanya Rajendran, Divya Aslesha, Jayashree Arunachalam, Jisha Surya, Joyal George, M Rajshekhar, Maria Teresa Raju, Nandini Chandrashekar, Neel Madhav, Nikita Saxena, Parth MN, Pooja Prasanna, Prajwal Bhat, Prateek Goyal, Pratyush Deep, Ragamalika Karthikeyan, Raman Kirpal, Ravi Nair, Rokibuz Zaman, Sachi Hegde, Safwat Zargar, Shabbir Ahmed, Shivnarayan Rajpurohit, Siddharth Mishra, Sumedha Mittal, Supriya Sharma, Tabassum Barnagarwala and Vaishnavi Rathore.

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

_{Originally published in The Wire on August 20, 2025. By Anand Mangnale. https://thewire.in/business/adani-us-indictment-lobbying-campaign}

On November 20, 2024, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed an indictment against the Adani Group, charging its chairman Gautam Adani, his nephew Sagar Adani and other senior executives with orchestrating a “massive bribery scheme” to win energy contracts in India. This event changed the dynamics of the Adani Group’s newly initiated lobbying efforts in the US. From a modest commercial lobbying exercise, it turned into a targeted lobbying effort with two of most renowned legal and lobbying firms brought on board for what appears to have been a crisis management campaign.

An analysis of federal lobbying disclosures from 2023 to 2025 reveals a distinct three- phase strategy, providing a timeline of Adani’s response to escalating US legal and regulatory pressure. This data has been made available by OpenSecrets, a US-based research group tracking money in US politics and its effect on elections and public policy.

The Adani Group has called the charges in the DOJ indictment “baseless” and denied them. The group said in a press statement on November 21 that it has always upheld and is steadfastly committed to “maintaining the highest standards of governance, transparency and regulatory compliance across all jurisdictions of its operations.”

Phase 1, 2023: The beginning, modest commercial lobbying

Throughout 2023, the Adani Group’s lobbying footprint in Washington D.C. was minimal and focused on business objectives.

The total lobbying expenditure for the year was only $40,000. This effort was run entirely in-house by its subsidiary, Adani Solar USA, with a single registered lobbyist, Anurag Varma.

The group’s stated aim was to engage with a range of government bodies, including the Department of Commerce, Department of State, Export-Import Bank of the US, National Security Council and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. The focus, then, was on commercial interests related to the company’s solar business and general trade issues.

The main player managing this was Varma, who has extensive experience in lobbying in the US. He has been hired by Indian and Indian-American players – including the Indian government – wanting to advocate for their causes in Washington since the 1990s.

Phase 2, late 2024: The indictment and immediate reaction

The unsealing of the DOJ indictment in November 2024 triggered an immediate strategic shift in Adani’s approach to Washington.

In a rapid response to the indictment, the very next day, on November 21, 2024, Adani hired a major law and lobbying firm, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. While the firm’s official registration cited lobbying on “Issues related to the supply chain”, the timing, immediately following the indictment, made it clear that it was likely a response to the legal crisis the company was facing.

With the hiring of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, Adani’s lobbying team expanded to five individuals, four of whom were “revolving door” profiles, meaning people with extensive prior government insider experience. Notably, the team included former Member of Congress Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. The group’s total lobbying spending for 2024 nearly doubled, going up to $70,000, with an additional $20,000 paid to Akin Gump. Also, its list of lobbying targets grew to include the White House.

This marked an escalation from commercial advocacy to the quest for high-level political influence.

Phase 3, 2025: The crisis campaign involving high-profile law firms

The first half of 2025, according to the group’s filings, saw Adani’s crisis-response apparatus grow, with a massive surge in spending and the hiring of elite legal defence firms, Kirkland & Ellis LLP and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP.

Lobbying expenditures exploded to $150,000 in just the first six months of 2025, more than doubling the spending of the entire previous year. The number of lobbyists engaged went up to eight.

Source: Data made available by OpenSecrets

This hints towards a shift to legal defence. The focus of the lobbying effort moved directly to Adani Green Energy, the subsidiary at the heart of the bribery allegations. On January 20, 2025, Adani Green Energy retained two of the US’s most powerful law firms for white- collar defence: Kirkland & Ellis and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. The registration forms for both firms were direct, stating they were hired to lobby on “Green energy issues and related criminal and civil matters.”

This explicitly connects their work to the DOJ case in the Eastern District of New York, and marks the final shift from commercial promotion to legal defence and high-level lobbying. The new lobbying team included top-tier legal talent such as William Burck, a former deputy counsel to the US president and now a lobbyist at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.

The main target, with the new legal teams in place, is solely the Department of State. All the other government agencies it had said it was engaging with in previous years’ filings no longer found a place. Given the international nature of the bribery allegations and the

involvement of foreign officials, the State Department is a critical agency for the company to engage with as it navigates its defence in the US criminal case.

Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan’s and Kirkland’s lobbying, according to their filings, covers Energy/Nuclear, lobbying related to Law Enforcement/Courts/Judges/Crimes/Prisons and Civil Rights and Civil Liberties with the State Department for the Adani Group. The move from multi-agency efforts to just the State Department suggests that the main target of the efforts is the indictment.

Lobbying activities

_{Source: Data and filings made available by OpenSecrets}

The federal lobbying records illustrate a clear and reactive strategy. The Adani Group’s engagement in Washington transformed from a low-level commercial effort into a high profile legal and lobbying operation in a direct response to the US criminal investigation.

The timeline and expenditure increase, hiring of elite law firms specialising in government connections including one with a former “Deputy Counsel to the President, Special Counsel to the President, Deputy Staff Secretary” as the main lobbyist, along with the explicitly stated purpose of lobbying on “criminal matters” all point to a concerted campaign to manage the legal and reputational fallout from the DOJ indictment.

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

_{Banner: James O’Brien/OCCRP}

_{Originally published in OCCRP on December 1, 2023. By Will Jordan and Anand Mangnale. https://www.occrp.org/en/project/dominica-passports-of-the-caribbean/businessman-who-bought-dominica-passport-and-funded-uk-tories-now-under-investigation-in-india}

Key Findings

Businessman Gursamarjit Singh, a major donor to the U.K.’s Conservative Party, paid over $100,000 in March 2013 to obtain a Dominican passport. Last year, Indian police issued a “Look Out Circular” against Singh, following a complaint alleging fraud filed by his sister-in-law. Singh denies the allegations. The Hinwick House, an 18-bedroom home Singh bought in 2015, is now on sale for nearly 8 million British pounds.

Back in the early 2010s, Gursamarjit Singh was thriving. His start-up company, IndiaHomes, was promising to “revolutionize” India’s real estate market by offering tech-led, online-only property sales services. As the business prospered, Singh himself amassed a property portfolio in India and the U.K. worth millions of dollars.

But in April 2015, Singh stepped down as the firm’s operational managing director during a property market crash. The next year, IndiaHomes went out of business, leaving scores of customers out of pocket. Singh then resigned as the company’s registered director.

By that point, Singh had given up his Indian citizenship and purchased a passport from Dominica, a Caribbean island nation that sells its citizenship around the world. With the global access offered by his new nationality, Singh left his former life behind, and moved to the U.K. He started using his nickname, “Sam” Singh, became a major Conservative party donor, and bought a mansion now on sale for about $10 million.

OCCRP has obtained a cache of documents detailing Singh’s business affairs, including bank statements, company documents, and invoices. Together with newly available legal and corporate records, they show how transnational elites can use so-called “golden passports,” coupled with financial tools such as offshore trusts, to move money, travel, and build a new life abroad.

Last year, Indian police issued a so-called “Look Out Circular” against Singh, following a complaint alleging fraud filed by his sister-in-law in India. The circular requires authorities to watch for him at border crossings and arrest or detain him for questioning if he enters the country, according to two Indian lawyers. Police have not formally filed charges, but online records show the complaint is still open.

In a response to a request for comment, a Delhi-based lawyer for Singh denied the allegations and told OCCRP that “the Look Out Circular relates to an unfortunate private familial dispute between our client and his sister-in-law who has personal enmity against him.”

Meanwhile, scores of IndiaHomes customers have banded together online for years to complain that the company short-changed them. No legal action has been taken against Singh or the company over the complaints, which Singh denies.

Singh has long since been set up in the U.K., where he has bought high-end property and established companies using his new nationality, and mingled among high society.

Singh’s lawyer told OCCRP that IndiaHomes was “a successful venture” and “all the decisions were taken by the executives / board of the Company and not by our client.” The lawyer added that IndiaHomes was “a multi-investor and multi-director company and the [sic] all the decisions were taken by the executives / board of the Company and not by our client.”

The lawyer said “there is no doubt or lack of clarity” as to whether Singh had “the financial ability to buy properties or invest in any other businesses and there is no legal restriction

on the same.” The lawyer said that Singh’s Dominica citizenship was acquired “with the purpose of easing business travel and avoiding lengthy delays for cumbersome visa restrictions.”

About the Project

Singh’s name was among roughly 7,700 reviewed as part of Dominica: Passports of the Caribbean, an international collaboration between OCCRP and partners. The project examined a system that British authorities say has involved “clear and evident abuse”. (Read more about the project here.)

‘On Your Side’

Singh’s online real estate agency, IndiaHomes, framed itself as a tech-driven innovator in the country’s rapidly expanding property market. One TV advertisement opened with quickfire shots of unscrupulous real estate agents laughing menacingly into the camera while waving wads of cash. Unlike those crooks, the , IndiaHomes was “on your side.”

_{A photograph showing the lobby of the building that housed IndiaHomes in Delhi.}

IndiaHomes worked by getting discounts from construction companies — usually between one and 2.5 percent of the property’s value — and promising to pass the savings on to customers. In one case, the company promised a discount of about $2,500, one percent of the value of a roughly $250,000 property sale. However, the buyer said he never received the discount. (Singh’s lawyer said that: “During his tenure (at the firm), IndiaHomes never issued any passback or discounting payments to anyone.”)

When customers bought their homes, they received “credit notes,” which IndiaHomes pledged to redeem. But, crucially, the customers needed to pay the full price up-front before claiming the discounts.

Scores of customers have said that, once the money was paid, they were not able to get their money from IndiaHomes. Extensive complaints against the company appeared on India’s National Consumer Complaint forum, while homebuyers banded together informally in WhatsApp groups and online forums to try to get their discounts.

One customer, Sumit Gautam, made a complaint to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, writing that “after more than five years and consistent follow up… we have still not received this brokerage discount.”

“My humble request [is] to please take appropriate action against IndiaHomes,” he wrote.

No legal action has been brought against IndiaHomes over the accusations, which Singh’s lawyers said he “categorically denies.” Singh’s India-based lawyers said that the accusations — which were reported extensively in openDemocracy in 2021 — were “baseless and denied in toto.”

Singh’s lawyers said openDemocracy was subject to an ongoing investigation by New Delhi police over the article. The publication said it had received no notice of the investigation.

OCCRP obtained nine credit notes dated between 2011 and 2015, which had either been posted online or provided to reporters by customers who said they had not been paid the money they were owed. One note, dated Jan. 20, 2015, said that IndiaHomes’ parent company, India World Technologies Pvt. Ltd., “reserves the right in its absolute discretion to amend the terms and conditions any time without prior information.”

_{Credit: IndiaHomes.com An archived screenshot of the IndiaHomes website, which is now offline.}

By 2014, India’s property market had slowed down. As IndiaHomes started struggling, Singh was spending. A document outlining the company’s response to a due diligence report commissioned by shareholders showed that auditors flagged several of Singh’s expenditures that year. The document indicates the auditors had found “unsatisfactory supportings” for payments worth around $160,000 to a life coach, the online retailer Amazon, as well as travel, hotel, and entertainment expenses.

The same report stated that IndiaHomes “uses Marketing Agencies to disburse and manage passbacks and discounting payments.” It added that around $700,000 worth of discounts were “pending disbursal post collection” at the end of 2014, indicating IndiaHomes was in possession of funds that were due to be paid out. It is not clear how much of this money was ever paid out.

In April 2015, Singh stepped down as managing director of the company but retained his shareholding.

IndiaHomes announced in April 2016 that it had stopped business activities. The company was not closed down, however, but instead was placed under the ownership of successive offshore companies in Mauritius and the United Arab Emirates. Corporate registries do not say who owns these companies. Singh still held his shares in IndiaHomes as recently as 2019, according to Indian company filings.

Legally Dominican

While at IndiaHomes, Singh had been laying the groundwork for a life beyond India.

On March 27, 2013, Singh paid $104,765 to legally obtain a Dominican passport — which required him to give up his Indian nationality under Indian law prohibiting dual citizenship. The new Dominica passport allowed travel to 130 countries without a visa or with a visa on arrival, as well as the possibility of obtaining a 10-year U.S. visa.

Singh had also been buying properties in the U.K. In 2012, property records show, he bought a house in Buckinghamshire in the U.K. for about 3.1 million British pounds (around $4 million) via a British Virgin Islands company, Linkfield Group Ltd, with part of the cost covered by a mortgage from ABN Amro bank in the Channel Islands.

The offshore company Linkfield also held an investment portfolio of stocks and bonds, through a Barclays Bank account in Singapore, worth nearly $5 million, bank statements obtained by OCCRP show. (Reporters cross-referenced foreign exchange rates during the dates mentioned in the statements and checked the Buckinghamshire property investment against public records.)

In 2015 Sam Singh added Hinwick House, pictured here, to his portfolio.

In 2015, using his Dominican citizenship, Singh added Hinwick House — an 18-bedroom home modeled on the original Buckingham Palace — to his property portfolio for another 4 million pounds (about $6 million at the time).

As well as the U.K. property, Singh also began integrating himself into elevated British social circles. Between 2014 and 2019, he donated a little over 270,000 pounds to the ruling Conservative Party, financial disclosures show. He has not donated anything since then.

_{charity, Elephant Family. (Credit: Sam Singh/Instagram Sam Singh is seen with now-Queen Camilla at an event for the wildlife)}

In 2016, Singh was named a trustee of the Elephant Family, a wildlife charity that counts King Charles and Queen Camilla as its so-called Royal Presidents.

Queen Camilla’s nephew, the recently knighted Sir Ben Elliot, became a director of Singh’s newly-formed British business, Real World Technologies Ltd, in April 2017. Elliot was chairman of the Conservative Party for three years between 2019 and 2022. Former Conservative member of parliament Baroness Kate Rock was also on the Real World board of directors. (Elliot and Rock did not respond to requests for comment.)

The business said it would use artificial intelligence to offer state-of-the-art online real estate services. As of last year, the company had just 20 pounds in cash assets, and was owed just over 10,000 pounds, company financial statements show. Its books say it has zero employees.

Elliott resigned from his position in 2019, and the baroness stepped down early the next year. The company’s subsidiary now does business as an online estate agent operating in Dubai named “Memorable.”

_{Sam Singh is seen outside 10 Downing Street in this social media photo. (Credit: Sam Singh/Instagram)}

After making his UK move, the IndiaHomes founder collected photos of himself pheasant shooting, standing outside 10 Downing Street, and smiling alongside Theresa May and Boris Johnson, two Tory party leaders who would both later become prime ministers. Johnson even signed the visitors book at Hinwick House, according to a photo Singh posted on his now-private Instagram account.

May and Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.

Singh’s ‘Capo di Capi’

Singh also had joint business interests with Arvind Khanna, an Indian politician and businessman who was charged in India this year with profiting from an allegedly corrupt military aircraft deal involving a research agency of the Indian Defense Ministry. (The case has not yet gone to trial.)

Company records from the Indian business registry show that, in 2006, Singh jointly invested in a company that developed a Delhi hotel with an investment company majority owned by Khanna. The company was sold in 2012.

In an email exchange with his sister-in-law, Priyanka Singh, that was used as part of her civil complaint, Singh also said that Khanna’s portfolio was among “various pools of investments” that were managed at the time by his office staff.

Singh publicly posted a birthday message for Khanna on Instagram in 2020, calling him “Capo di Capi,” an Italian mafia term meaning boss of bosses. Singh’s lawyers have described the comment as “a private joke between old friends.”

In March 2018 — after IndiaHomes had ceased trading and Singh had stepped down as director but remained a shareholder — its parent entity bought a loss-making aviation company owned by Khanna that had no operating profit and no fixed assets for $300,000, the Indian business registry shows.

Singh’s India-based lawyers said that Singh did not have a business relationship with Khanna, who was known to Singh as a friend “amongst his hundreds of other personal friends.”

Khanna did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Winning in India’

At a glamorous launch event in May 2014 for his book “Winning in India” — a compendium of business lessons by India’s top entrepreneurs, including Singh himself — Singh talked of the importance of family. His presentation included a sign stating, “family is the raison d’etre for Indians.”

_{Sam Singh seen at the launch of “Winning in India.” (Credit: Winning in India/Facebook)}

At the same time, Singh was engaged in financial dealings with his own family that would eventually lead to a heated legal dispute.

In 2021, his brother’s wife, Priyanka Singh, filed a civil lawsuit against Singh in the Delhi High Court, seeking the equivalent of about $2.3 million in damages. In her complaint, she said she had transferred around $1.4 million to three of his companies in 2013. Priyanka became a director in all three firms. But she had little control over the companies and was “merely made to sign some documents,” she said in her complaint.

Priyanka declined to comment.

In her claim — which includes bank statements, emails from Singh, and his legal response — Priyanka said that Singh had told her that her money would be put into a “safe investment” of property for around seven or eight years. She said she was told her money would triple in that time, but in reality received nothing besides one payment in May 2019 and lost her original stake. Priyanka accused Singh of “seeking to fritter away” her assets “by parking them in shell companies, some of them on foreign soil.”

Priyanka said in her claim that Singh paid her 5 million rupees, worth roughly $70,000 at the time of payment in May 2019, but nothing else.

By the time she launched legal action against him, Singh had cut her off, an email exchange submitted as an exhibit in the case shows. In one message to Priyanka the year before, as the two were arguing over the return of her investment, Singh had described her allegations as “naive and ludicrous.”

Sam Singh pictured with former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

In a legal response to her complaint, Singh said her allegations were “wrong, frivolous and misconceived.” He admitted he has not returned her money to her, but blamed a downturn in the property market.

The lawyer for Singh denied that the email exchange submitted as part of the court case was real, and said the emails were part of a “smear campaign” launched by his sister-in- law.

The case is ongoing and no judgment has been issued. Priyanka has also filed a criminal complaint to Indian police. That complaint remains open, though police have not filed formal charges.

Singh currently splits his time between the U.K. and United Arab Emirates, according to his LinkedIn profile. He is running a new property venture focused on artificial intelligence and styles himself as a “serial entrepreneur.”

Before the U.K. move, Singh’s book had offered pearls of wisdom, including “flamboyance is admired, but rarely rewarded.” He is now trying to sell Hinwick House, which is listed for nearly 8 million pounds.

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

_{Banner: James O’Brien}

_{Originally published in OCCRP on May 2, 2022. By Anand Mangnale (OCCRP) and Alina Tsogoeva (OCCRP ID). https://www.occrp.org/en/investigation/below-the-radar-how-an-indian-tycoons-petrochemicals-empire-quietly-dodged-iran-sanctions}

Key Findings

In January 2020, Mumbai customs authorities seized a cargo of petrochemicals, commissioned by Dubai-based Petrochem and involving several apparent proxy companies on suspicion that its origin was misdeclared. Under questioning, the captain admitted the documents were falsified and the ship had been loaded in Iran. Shipping documents show how false paperwork disguised the trade in Iranian petrochemicals in violation of U.S. and other sanctions.

Satellite tracking data suggests at least two other vessels associated with Petrochem’s trade followed a similar pattern of movements consistent with sanction-busting.

Indian tycoon Yogesh Mehta is not shy about his success. In dozens of interviews, YouTube videos, and Twitter posts, he recounts how his hard work and ingenuity made his Dubai-based business, Petrochem, the number one chemical distributor in the Middle East and Africa.

But throughout the many accounts of his rise, Mehta has omitted one element of his business’s operations: a hidden trade in sanctioned Iranian petrochemicals.

_{Credit: ABLF Yogesh Mehta.}

The United States has applied various sanctions against Tehran since 1979, most recently to try to prevent the country from developing nuclear weapons. The European Union has similar sanctions in place.

In search of hard currency, Iran has consistently sought to evade these restrictions. It has found the most success exporting petrochemicals, which are much harder to trace than oil shipments. Its exports of petrochemicals and petroleum products to China, India, and other

markets reportedly brought in some US$20 billion in 2020, twice the amount it earned from crude oil.

Now, an OCCRP investigation — based on shipping documents, Indian court files, an analysis of ship-tracking data, and interviews with industry executives who have done business with Petrochem and its proxy companies — has uncovered evidence that Mehta’s conglomerate participated in this booming trade, and that false paperwork was used to conceal its role.

Neither India nor the United Arab Emirates ban trade with Iran, meaning that Mehta’s dealings do not violate sanctions in either of the countries where his companies are registered. But misdeclaring the origin of cargo violates customs regulations and laws in India, the U.S., the U.K., and other countries.

The revelations could also affect the companies’ access to the U.S. banking system and the financial institutions that form the linchpin of international commerce. In December 2020, the U.S. sanctioned four other UAE and China-based companies for supporting the sale of Iranian petrochemicals, which it called “an important revenue source for the Iranian regime, generating wealth for its corrupt leaders and financing a range of nefarious activities.”

Petrochem’s involvement in the trade came to the attention of Indian authorities in January 2020, when Mumbai customs officials, acting on a tip, apprehended a vessel leased by Petrochem Middle East India and other companies linked to Mehta. Documents related to the seizure, which was not reported in Indian or international media, show the ship’s operators had concealed the real origin of its cargo: Iran.

This sensitive part of Mehta’s business has been masked from public view, and from the authorities, by a network of proxy companies, false paperwork, and the disabling of transponders used to track the tankers.

Proxy Companies

OCCRP has found links between Mehta’s Petrochem and four companies that have been used to disguise shipments of Iranian petrochemicals.

Metron Middle East FZE (UAE)

• The Indian government in 2017 declared Petrochem and Metron “sister concerns” in findings related to a customs tariff violation case. Corporate records don’t show a formal link between the two companies, but two industry sources who have done business with the companies say they are both overseen by Mehta, working through Nazan Nobakht, director of chartering and logistics at Petrochem Middle East. There are several other links between Petrochem and Metron:

  • Harshadkumar Upadhyay, Metron’s managing director, was the manager for bulk operations of the Dubai branch of Petrochem from 2006 to 2014, when he formed Metron.

  • Metron’s website was registered by Petrochem’s accounts manager. Both companies have offices on different floors of the same building in Dubai.

  • Business information provider Sayari lists several telephone numbers for Metron, including two that are associated with current Petrochem employees. Calls to those numbers, and another listed on Metron’s website, went unanswered.

Kriscon DMCC (UAE)

• Upadhyay is also the director of Kriscon and holds shares in the company. In addition, a woman listed as a sales manager in a company brochure identifies herself as a current Petrochem employee in her LinkedIn profile.

Asia Bright Inc. Ltd. (Hong Kong)

• Upadhyay is the director of this company.

Indisol Marketing Private Limited (India)

• Indisol was founded by Niti Umesh Bhatt, a former director of Petrochem Middle East India, just 14 days after he left Petrochem in July 2018.

The network of proxies has made it almost impossible to determine the full extent of Petrochem’s involvement in Iranian petrochemicals. But the shipment apprehended in Mumbai fits a larger pattern: Ship tracking data shows that two other vessels leased by companies with ties to Mehta’s business empire showed a similar pattern of movements, including disabling their transponders near Iran before turning them back on in international waters.

Neither Mehta, his secretary, nor a Petrochem human resources official responded to multiple calls, letters, emails, or messages through social media accounts requesting comment for this article.

_{Petrochemical plant storage tanks. (Credit: Kevpix/Alamy Stock Photo)}

The Good Life

Yogesh Mehta — sometimes known as “Yogi” — presents himself as a modern chief executive, often sporting gray suits and bright ties while serving up inspirational business aphorisms.

“Dreams have to become reality, and the way to make dreams a reality is the endeavor, the enterprise, and the real vision you have,” he said in one interview. “Entrepreneurs are born,” he said in another, “and if you aren’t, then you can never become one.”

Now 62, the Mumbai native often recounts how he came up working at his father’s chemical business after earning a degree in chemistry.

After a series of business failures, he fell into debt and moved to Dubai in 1990 to try for a fresh start. There, he established a small chemical distribution company with another Indian expatriate. In 1995, Mehta broke away and started a new venture, Petrochem.

The business made him a wealthy man. By 2011, Mehta had accumulated nine luxury cars and a summer mansion in London, according to a report that year in Arabian Business. A few years later, he reportedly spent 14 million British pounds (around $21 million at the time) on a three-day celebration for his son’s wedding in Florence, featuring an 1,800- member cast and crew including Indian dancers, Italian sopranos, mimes, and fire throwers.

His family’s villa on Dubai’s “Millionaire’s Row” includes a nightclub, and he has reportedly become close with Bollywood celebrities, including superstar actor and producer Amitabh Bachchan. He is also an enthusiastic wine collector.

“Money is a very important grease to the machinery of a good life,” Mehta told Arabian Business. “Without the good life, why are we even living? We might as well be robotic animals.”

His chemical empire continued to grow. In 2018, Mehta’s business partner decided to sell his Petrochem stake, giving Mehta and his son, Rohan, control of the business.

Today, Petrochem claims to be one of the world’s largest chemical traders, and the top chemical distributor in the Middle East and Africa combined, with operations in over 80 countries and offices in the UAE, India, Singapore, Taiwan, and China. The concern reported $1.1 billion in revenues in 2017, and Mehta has said that turnover had reached $1.5 billion in 2019.

The following year, a bust at Mumbai’s port would give the first glimpse into one previously unknown aspect of his business’s operations.

Bust of the Chem Trader

When the Marshall Islands-registered MT Chem Trader docked in Mumbai on January 25, 2020, customs officials were waiting.

According to its official papers, issued by a UAE-based marine service provider called Atlantic Global Shipping, the small tanker had been on a circuitous and counterintuitive journey over the previous seven days.

The bills of lading showed that the ship had carried two petrochemicals — toluene, which is commonly used to make paint, and mixed xylene, an industrial solvent — from the Indian port of Mundra to the Emirati port of Jebel Ali. It had then carried different loads of the same two chemicals back to India, this time to Mumbai.

Apart from the exchange’s circular nature, another aspect should have raised eyebrows: India is highly dependent on toluene imports, meaning that exporting significant volumes to the UAE from there would make little commercial sense.

An industry insider with direct knowledge of Petrochem operations told Mumbai customs officials that the route described in the Chem Trader’s documents was fictitious. He reported that the shipment it had just brought to Mumbai had originated not in Jebel Ali, but in the Iranian port of Bandar-e Imam Khomeini, to be delivered to the UAE, China, and India.

The Mumbai officials seized and offloaded the shipment. According to documents from the bust obtained by OCCRP, the ship’s captain admitted under questioning that the paperwork was false and the chemicals had been loaded in Iran. The captain also said he had been instructed to lie. Seizure documents do not say if he identified who gave him those instructions.

The false documents do indicate who was behind the ship’s journey: They show that one of the fraudulent orders it carried had been commissioned by an Indian branch of Petrochem for delivery to its Emirati branch. Five other companies were also involved as shippers and receivers, at least four of which are Petrochem proxies or associates.

Documents obtained by OCCRP and authenticated by a senior Indian customs official show the ship’s real journey to Iran.

The Iran-issued documents showed that the Chem Trader had picked up its cargo in the Iranian port of Bandar-e Imam Khomeini. Unusually, neither document notes the “consignee” or “notify address” — that is, those who are accepting and receiving the cargo.

A bill of lading issued in Iran on January 12, 2020, showed that the Chem Trader picked up a cargo of 5,503 metric tons of mixed xylene from Iran’s Bandar-e Imam Khomeini port, headed for China.

A second bill of lading, dated January 14, shows about 5,000 metric tons of toluene were loaded at the same Iranian port and headed to India.

Chem Trader was soon released. It was not clear how the case was settled, but a customs official said that similar cases are usually resolved out of court through the payment of a fine. The ship has since been renamed several times and is still sailing.

The seizure of the Chem Trader’s cargo represented just a sliver of Iran’s annual petrochemical exports, but it is the only time Petrochem has been caught moving Iranian goods. It also provided a rare glimpse into how such operations are structured.

_{An industrial ship at Iran’s Bandar-e Imam Khomeini port. (Credit: UPI/Maryam Rahmanian / Alamy Stock Photo)}

A Circular Trade

Satellite tracking data gives more insight into Chem Trader’s movements.

Data obtained from MarineTraffic, a real-time shipping tracker, shows Chem Trader left the Indian port of Mundra on January 7, and then apparently disabled its automatic identification system in the Arabian Sea on the following day.

According to its Iranian documents, the ship loaded a cargo of petrochemicals in Bandar-e Imam Khomeini on January 14. By the time it apparently turned on its tracker the following day, it was approaching the Emirati port of Jebel Ali. Once it arrived, additional documents were issued claiming that it had loaded its cargo there.

Based on the volume of cargo seized by Mumbai authorities, the ship appears in fact to have unloaded part of the Iranian cargo in the UAE, which has a domestic petrochemical market and is also a redistribution hub. It then set sail for Mumbai with its remaining Iranian petrochemicals, where it was apprehended by customs authorities on January 25.

Analysis of ship tracking data from two other vessels hired by the proxy companies linked to Mehta — the MT Patriotic and the MT Taihua Glory — shows that they followed a similar pattern of movements. In both cases, the ships arrived in the UAE before disappearing from AIS screens for multiple days near Iran.

In the case of the Patriotic, the tracking data shows that it was in or around the Emirati ports of Fujairah en route to Al Jubail before disappearing on January 20. It reappeared briefly two days later, displaying what appear to be false coordinates showing it to be near Russia, before vanishing for another 15 hours, reappearing near the UAE, and finally heading to India on January 29.

_{A map showing the movements of the Patriotic, which disappeared from tracking data on January 20. (Credit: Edin Pašović/OCCRP)}

The Taihua Glory, leased by the Dubai-based Kriscon, showed a similar pattern, departing India on October 9, anchoring in Dubai, and then disappearing for ten days. It reappeared on October 23 near the Gulf of Oman before heading back to India. OCCRP obtained a bill of lading that shows Taihua Glory, like the Chem Trader, was secretly loaded in Iran at the same port as the Chem Trader with roughly 2,000 metric tons of caustic soda on October 21, just two days before it reappeared.

_{A map showing the movements of the Taihua Glory, which disappeared from tracking systems for ten days before reappearing near the Gulf of Oman. Shipping documents show it was secretly loaded in Iran. (Credit: Edin Pašović/OCCRP)}

_{Credit: OCCRP Customs document showing Taihua Glory was loaded in Iran.}

Jim Curtis, a retired U.S. Navy officer with experience in maritime surveillance, told OCCRP the ships’ movements suggested that they were being used to evade sanctions.

“Based on my observations during at-sea operations between 2004 and 2015, the behavior of these ships fits the profile of ships that are purposely busting sanctions in that area and conducting unsanctioned trade,’’ Curtis said in an email.

Irene Kenyon, a former intelligence officer at the U.S. Treasury Department and now director of risk intelligence at the consultancy FiveBy Solutions, agreed that Petrochem appeared to be evading sanctions.

“This does not look great,” she said. “At best, its leadership does not know what its employees are doing and is completely unaware of these violations, and that’s not a great look.”

In March, another piece of news suggested that further scrutiny may be on the way: The Financial Action Task Force, a global financial crime watchdog, said it was adding the UAE to a list of jurisdictions subject to closer monitoring, known as its “grey” list.

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

_{Originally published in Tempo on June 28, 2026. By Adil Al Hasan (Tempo); Anand Mangnale. https://magz.tempo.co/read/economy/44411/fake-cia-agent-infiltrated-prabowos-family}

THE journey that brought Niels Troost and Gaurav Srivastava to President Prabowo Subianto’s residence at the Garuda Yaksa estate in Hambalang, Bogor, West Java, went smoothly. Troost, a Dutch oil trader, still remembered the visit with his former business partner in mid-2022 to introduce himself to Prabowo, who was then Indonesia’s Defense Minister.

“It felt special because we were escorted by a special vehicle that helped us get through the traffic,” he told Tempo, recalling the trip in interviews conducted in January and February 2026.

During the drive to Hambalang, Srivastava told Troost that he frequently visited and stayed at the estate. He said Prabowo respected him because he had helped track down those responsible for the Bali bombings. He also claimed to have removed Prabowo’s name from the United States immigration blacklist after the Indonesian politician had spent 20 years barred from entering the US over alleged human rights violations committed while serving as Commander of the Indonesian Military’s (TNI) Special Forces Command during the New Order era.

Before arriving at the Garuda Yaksa compound, Srivastava told Troost that Prabowo had an unusual habit of allowing spider webs and insects to remain throughout the house. According to him, Prabowo believed spider webs should not be removed because they were part of nature and deserved respect.

_{Luhut Binsar Panjaitan (left), Joko Widodo, Gaurav Srivastava, and Prabowo Subianto at the Global Food Security Forum in Bali, November 2022. BPMI Setpres/Muchlis Jr.}

Troost recalled that residents around Hambalang waved at him and Srivastava shortly before they reached Prabowo’s residence. Upon arriving at Garuda Yaksa, he saw Prabowo’s staff warmly welcoming Srivastava as if greeting an old acquaintance. Srivastava embraced several staff members while asking about them and their families. Looking around the compound, Troost noticed numerous spider webs, just as Srivastava had described.

Troost was astonished to see a giant wooden eagle statue in one of the waiting rooms at Garuda Yaksa. According to Srivastava, the statue symbolized Prabowo’s admiration for the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Srivastava claimed that he had given the statue to Prabowo as a gift. The Indian-born American businessman also told Troost that he was a CIA agent.

But the partnership between the two men did not last long. After their meeting in Indonesia, Troost and Srivastava parted ways in May the following year. The split stemmed from allegations that Srivastava fabricated a series of stories to extort tens of millions of dollars from Troost’s company, Paramount Energy & Commodities.

Troost then filed a lawsuit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act against Srivastava in a California court on January 21, 2026, accusing him of fraud, extortion, and a smear campaign. He amended the lawsuit in June 2026.

Troost accused Srivastava of being a con artist who masqueraded as an unofficial operative for a US foreign intelligence agency. Srivastava came under increasing scrutiny as allegations emerged that he had committed fraud in multiple countries.

Over the past five months, beginning in February 2026, Tempo and an independent journalist interviewed more than a dozen sources in Indonesia and abroad to trace

Srivastava’s activities in Indonesia. The reporting team also examined documents, emails, photographs, court filings, and open-source materials.

During several visits to Indonesia, Troost became one of the eyewitnesses to how Srivastava gained access to the country’s top business figures and government officials.

•••

NIELS Troost first met Gaurav Srivastava when the Dutch businessman’s company faced the threat of Western sanctions for trading Russian oil to the United States. Srivastava told Troost that he could shield the company from those sanctions. He also introduced himself as a CIA non-official cover operative.

Recordings of conversations submitted as part of Troost’s court complaint showed Srivastava claiming that he served as a non-official operative alongside Elon Musk and Warren Buffett. “I can reach eight senators in a day... and the President in the White House,” he said to Troost in a recording made in May 2023. “This isn’t a game. This is serious,” he added.

According to four sources, Srivastava also posed as a CIA agent while in Indonesia. A number of Indonesian officials and businesspeople came to know him as an intelligence operative. Many of them believed his story and were deceived.

The sources said Srivastava’s claims were easy to accept because he was an exceptionally persuasive speaker. His close relationships with former North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley Clark, White House officials, and Prabowo Subianto reinforced his credibility. “He spoke to Prabowo the way you would speak to a friend,” one source said. “In my view, they had a very close relationship.”

Srivastava’s relationship with Prabowo extended beyond private meetings. At the Global Food Security Forum in Bali in November 2022, Srivastava introduced Prabowo as a true champion and an envoy of global peace and unity. He also referred to him as his dearest friend.

_{Hashim Djojohadikusumo attends the Global Food Security Forum, which was also attended by Gaurav Srivastava (third from left), in Bali, 2022. Atlantic Council}

Prabowo responded by thanking him before joking, “I call him Mr. G because your last name is sometimes difficult to pronounce.” At the same event, Prabowo’s younger brother, Hashim Djojohadikusumo, also displayed gestures of respect toward Srivastava.

The relationship between Srivastava and Prabowo did not develop overnight. Based on information from several sources and Troost’s court documents, Srivastava arrived in Indonesia in mid-2020 aboard a Gulfstream jet from the United Kingdom.

Before Srivastava arrived in Indonesia, Sky Petroleum Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Karim Jobanputra asked one of his contacts in Indonesia to arrange a meeting between the American businessman and Prabowo at the Defense Ministry and deliver an invitation letter.

Karim did not respond to Tempo’s request for comment sent by email. Prabowo also did not respond to requests for comment regarding the contents of the invitation.

What is clear is that several months after receiving the letter from Srivastava, Prabowo traveled to Washington, D.C., in October 2020. The trip was significant for Prabowo as Defense Minister under President Joko Widodo, particularly after he had been barred from entering the United States for two decades.

In addition to meeting US Defense Secretary Mark Esper at the Pentagon to discuss Indonesia’s military modernization, Prabowo hosted a presentation for defense contractors at the St. Regis Hotel. The five-star hotel is located near the White House, the residence and workplace of the US president.

Two sources who attended the event said leading defense contractors presented their portfolios to Prabowo and his delegation, which included US diplomats and officials.

Throughout many of the sessions, Prabowo and Srivastava sat side by side. “After each contractor finished presenting its proposal, they immediately left the room. Then the doors opened again for the next presentation. The process repeated throughout the day,” one of the sources said.

Prabowo’s delegation and Srivastava also visited The Bombay Club, about a five-minute walk from the St. Regis Hotel. Their trip was briefly halted after they became caught in a

Black Lives Matter demonstration outside the White House protesting the police killing of George Floyd.

No agreements were signed during the event at the luxury hotel. But discussions over defense procurement continued a month later in a telephone conversation between Christopher Miller, Esper’s successor, and Prabowo in November 2020.

Several weeks later, Miller flew to Jakarta. On December 7, 2020, he met Prabowo at the Defense Ministry. Miller was accompanied by Kash Patel, now Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who was then serving as Miller’s Chief of Staff.

In addition, a photograph obtained by Tempo showed Prabowo, Miller, and Srivastava meeting at the Gerindra Party General Chair’s residence on Jalan Kertanegara in South Jakarta. Among the topics discussed at the meeting was the sale of US fighter jets to Indonesia.

State Secretary Prasetyo Hadi did not respond to Tempo’s interview request for Prabowo, which was sent via WhatsApp and email. In February and June 2026, Tempo also sent formal letters requesting an interview with Prabowo through the State Secretariat Ministry. As of publication, Prasetyo had not responded to those requests.

•••

LESS than two weeks after Christopher Miller’s visit to Indonesia, the Defense Ministry issued three letters—two letters of agreement and one letter of intent—on December 22 and 23, 2020. Signed by Defense Procurement Agency Chief Air Marshal Yusuf Jauhari, the letters were addressed to three companies owned by Gaurav Srivastava: Orbimo Corporation, Constentis Corporation, and Zegasus Corporation. Yusuf did not respond to Tempo’s messages or interview requests sent to his personal cellphone.

To Orbimo Corporation, the Defense Ministry expressed its intention to purchase 30 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. Another letter stated the ministry’s intent to buy 36 F-15EX fighter jets, along with spare parts, maintenance, and related support, from Zegasus Corporation. Meanwhile, the letter sent to Constentis Corporation outlined the ministry’s plan to build a joint operations command-and-control center.

All three letters ended with the same note: “This letter of agreement constitutes a binding obligation relating to the procurement referred to herein.” Each letter also listed Miller and Heidi Grant, Director of the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), as recipients of carbon copies.

Miller told Tempo that he did not receive copies of those letters until several years after they had been issued. The same was true of Heidi Grant’s agency, which oversees US defense sales to security partners and prospective allies.

Miller said the US Defense Department officials who visited Indonesia had no involvement in the issuance of the documents. “We also did not request them from Indonesia’s Defense Ministry, either officially or unofficially,” he said on Friday, June 5, 2026.

However, Miller confirmed that Srivastava attended the meetings in Jakarta, which included discussions on the sale of US fighter jets. He added that Srivastava used those meetings to create the impression that he possessed influence and privileged access in order to profit from them.

“My assessment, based on my brief interaction with him during the meeting you mentioned, is that he was simply a fraudster, an outsider who lingered around these kinds of interactions and tried to exploit the appearance of access and influence for his own financial gain,” Miller said. “He looked like an ordinary con man.”

_{President Prabowo Subianto with Wesley Clark (third from right) and Gaurav Srivastava (second from right) during a meeting in Washington, D.C., United States, October 20, 2022. Embassy of Indonesia in Washington}

Rico Sirait, Chief of the Defense Ministry’s Information Bureau, confirmed that the letters of intent existed. According to him, the documents were neither final decisions nor legally binding agreements. To date, he said, none of the ministry’s letters of intent with the three companies has resulted in an actual contract.

Rico claimed that all preliminary communications, including the issuance of letters of intent, were part of the routine exploratory process common in defense cooperation. “All of Indonesia’s defense cooperation and procurement processes are always carried out

carefully, in accordance with the principles of good governance and the applicable procedures and regulations,” he said on Monday, May 25, 2026.

Despite the ministry’s claim that its procurement process was handled carefully, Tempo’s review of documents related to the three companies suggested otherwise.

Orbimo and Zegasus were incorporated in the US state of Wyoming on the very same day the Defense Ministry issued its letters of intent. Given the 13-hour time difference between Jakarta and the United States, the companies were actually established only after the ministry had signed and issued the letters. Constentis, meanwhile, received its letter of intent to supply the joint operations command center just a few days after it was incorporated.

The three companies owned by Srivastava were little more than shell entities. Their corporate filings showed no revenue and no record of procuring sophisticated defense equipment. Moreover, by the time the letters of intent were issued, Srivastava already had a documented history of fraud and breach-of-contract disputes in court records.

Srivastava’s effort to secure contracts from the Defense Ministry appeared unstoppable. On July 7, 2021, Sky Petroleum Inc., a company listed in the United States, announced the launch of a joint venture with Srivastava called Unity Accipiter (UAC). Tempo’s investigation found that the company was actually incorporated as Unity Accipiter Corporation in Wyoming under the name of Sharon Srivastava, Srivastava’s wife.

Documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) stated that UAC had received a “definitive purchase letter” from Indonesia’s Defense Ministry in March 2021 to supply refurbished UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. The agreement, valued at US$480 million, included five years of maintenance.

Specifically, the helicopters requested by the Defense Ministry would be equipped with new engines, glass cockpits, and advanced avionics systems, along with a five-year maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) program. The filing also stated that UAC would receive 85 percent of the profits, while Sastaro Limited, a Sky Petroleum subsidiary, would receive the remaining 15 percent.

In fact, Sastaro Limited had no experience maintaining defense equipment. The Sky Petroleum subsidiary was an oil and gas company.

The joint venture between Sky Petroleum CEO Karim Jobanputra and Srivastava was dissolved on February 1, 2023. The dissolution notice stated that the partnership ended by mutual agreement and that there had been no material business activity with Indonesia’s Defense Ministry.

Another finding from Tempo’s investigation showed that SEC filings identified UAC as a Delaware company. But Srivastava’s UAC was registered in Wyoming. A comprehensive

search of Delaware’s corporate registry found no company named Unity Accipiter Corporation.

A source familiar with the arrangement said the agreement involving UAC was separate from the letter of intent concerning Black Hawk helicopters that the Defense Ministry had sent to another of Srivastava’s companies in December 2020. Had the contract materialized, however, it would have generated substantial profits.

On August 10, 2022, the US government approved the potential sale of 36 F-15ID fighter jets—a customized version of the F-15EX designed for Indonesia—in a deal worth US$13.9 billion. Most of that money would have gone to Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer.

Even so, one of Srivastava’s business associates said Srivastava was thrilled by the development because it promised enormous financial rewards. “He wanted to see that deal completed. It would have been a major achievement,” the associate said.

While strengthening his business prospects in Indonesia, Srivastava also cultivated political influence in Washington, D.C. He donated more than US$1 million to Democratic Party leaders and candidates in 2022 and 2023. He also managed to be photographed with President Joe Biden and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The effort was intended to bolster his image as a man with extensive connections and influence in the United States.

Srivastava’s success in obtaining letters of intent in Indonesia did not end there. A photograph obtained by Tempo showed Srivastava, Prabowo Subianto, Yusuf Jauhari, and Dirgantara Indonesia CEO Gita Amperiawan standing before a white-and-gold marble table, with two pens and two sets of documents laid out for signing.

On July 22, 2022, Dirgantara Indonesia signed a general operation agreement with Srivastava’s UAC. The cooperation covered the maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) of C-130 Hercules aircraft in a deal valued at US$150 million, or about Rp2.2 trillion at the exchange rate at the time.

Gita Amperiawan said the state-owned aerospace company later terminated its cooperation with UAC after the company failed the due diligence process. According to him, the agreement was only an exploratory one. Gita did not deny reports that UAC had serious problems, though he declined to elaborate on why the deal collapsed.

What is certain is that Dirgantara Indonesia ultimately assigned the Hercules MRO work to Garuda Maintenance Facility Aero Asia, a subsidiary of Garuda Indonesia. “We concluded that UAC was not strong enough. So we built synergies within the domestic ecosystem,” Gita said.

GMF AeroAsia’s Corporate Communications & CSR division stated that the company supported Dirgantara Indonesia in carrying out the Center Wing Box Replacement on one

C-130 aircraft. However, it said the support had no connection to any transfer of work from UAC. “There is no connection whatsoever,” GMF said in a written statement on Saturday, June 27, 2026.

•••

WHILE pursuing defense contracts with Indonesia’s Defense Ministry, Gaurav Srivastava also cultivated a business relationship with Hashim Djojohadikusumo, Prabowo Subianto’s younger brother. In August 2022, through Harvest Commodities SA—a commodities trading company owned by Niels Troost—Srivastava struck a deal with the founder of the Arsari Group to transport 50,000 metric tons of corn feed from Ukraine to Indonesia through Comexindo International.

The agreement between Srivastava and Hashim was witnessed by Ukraine’s Ambassador to Indonesia, Vasyl Hamianin. Srivastava reportedly also offered Hamianin a business opportunity. When contacted by Tempo on Thursday, April 2, 2026, Hamianin declined to comment, including on the legal troubles Srivastava is now facing. He said Srivastava was neither his friend nor his business associate. “Ask the people who gave you that information,” he said.

The relationship between Srivastava and Hashim continued. In November 2022, Srivastava arranged for a transfer of US$51 million from Paramount Energy and Commodities DMCC (PDMCC)—a company owned by Niels Troost in Dubai, United Arab Emirates—to the Arsari Group, claiming the funds would finance covert CIA operations and renewable energy investments. Srivastava and his team coordinated with Arsari executives to complete the transaction.

A month later, on December 2, PDMCC transferred US$51 million to Arsari Pradana Utama. In the company, which was established in December 2021, Hashim served as CEO and majority shareholder.

Transaction documents obtained by Tempo showed that Rp755 billion was deposited into Arsari Pradana Utama’s account at Bank Bukopin, while another Rp30.8 billion was transferred to an account at Bank Mandiri, both recorded as working capital. Bank Bukopin has since been renamed KB Bank.

Komala Sari, Head of Corporate Communications and Government Affairs at KB Bank Indonesia, declined to comment on the activity in Arsari Group’s accounts. She said KB Bank adheres to prudent banking principles and complies with all applicable regulations. “KB Bank is committed to protecting customer confidentiality and data security,” she said on Monday, April 20, 2026.

What is clear is that the transaction has now become one of the issues disputed by Troost, who alleges that Srivastava defrauded him. One week after the transfer, US$25 million was sent back to Srivastava to purchase a luxury home in the United States worth US$24.5 million.

WhatsApp messages and emails between Srivastava’s legal team and Maria Foley, an Arsari executive, showed both sides attempting to find ways to avoid raising suspicions among bank officials. Maria explicitly suggested describing the transfer as an equity investment to avoid banking regulations.

Srivastava’s legal team proposed sending the money directly to Birdsong Central LLC, one of Srivastava’s affiliated companies registered in Delaware, through promissory notes structured as two US$10 million loans and one US$5 million loan.

Maria rejected the proposal, saying bank officials would not approve it. Instead, she suggested routing the transfer through New Kapital Limited, a British Virgin Islands entity affiliated with the Arsari Group.

Before the transaction took place, Srivastava’s legal team asked New Kapital Limited to grant power of attorney to the law firm Karlin & Peebles, LLP Attorneys at Law. The arrangement was intended to make the transfer appear as the repayment of a loan still affiliated with the Arsari Group.

On December 28, 2022, Arsari Pradana Utama successfully transferred US$25 million to Karlin & Peebles through an Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Account (IOLTA), routing the payment from Bank Mandiri to First Republic Bank with the notation “NKL Repayment.”

The money was then immediately transferred to Birdsong Central LLC to purchase a luxury residence for Srivastava at 14180 W. Sunset Blvd. in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Birdsong transferred ownership of the property to Srivastava through Aurora Point LLC on January 5, 2023. Aurora Point LLC was incorporated in Delaware on October 12, 2022, and is owned by the Srivastava family.

After completing the first transaction, Srivastava’s team sought to obtain the remaining US$26 million. From February through September 2023, the team repeatedly pressed Arsari, offering different justifications each time. The requests intensified after Troost dismissed Srivastava from PDMCC in May 2023.

In one exchange, Srivastava’s attorney asked Arsari to transfer funds as payment for consulting services that Srivastava allegedly provided to Hashim in 2018. The attorney also offered personal guarantees from Srivastava and Sharon as lenders, with Arsari designated as the borrower responsible for repaying the money.

Srivastava’s attorney also requested that the funds be transferred to Echo Grove LLC, another company affiliated with Srivastava. Maria sought clarification about the relationship between PDMCC and Echo Grove, while noting that any transfer would automatically reduce the outstanding debt created in December 2022.

Undeterred, Srivastava’s legal team drafted a novation agreement restructuring the debt. The document stated that Arsari’s US$51 million loan from PDMCC would be assigned to Cedar West Ventures LLC, another Srivastava-affiliated company. Under the proposal, the remaining US$26 million would be paid in monthly installments of US$2 million from September 30, 2023, through September 30, 2024.

Frustrated by what they saw as Arsari’s lack of response, Srivastava and former CIA Station Chief John Maguire, whom Srivastava had recruited, threatened to accuse Hashim and the Arsari Group of financing terrorism, an allegation they claimed could damage Prabowo’s electoral prospects in the 2024 presidential election. To this day, the fate of the remaining US$26 million held by the Arsari Group remains unknown.

Before Troost fired Srivastava, Paramount had hired a private investigator, Jonas Rey, who is also Director of Athena Intelligence, to investigate Srivastava’s background.

Rey found that Srivastava, now 33, had a history of fraud and forgery. He said he was puzzled by how Srivastava managed to convince former CIA officers and senior generals with fabricated stories about being an intelligence operative. “Then we saw the enormous political donations he had made to elected officials across the United States, and suddenly everything made sense. He bought access on a scale I had rarely seen,” Rey said.

A Paramount spokesperson, who requested anonymity, described Srivastava as a master con artist who should be held accountable for the losses he caused. Paramount also hopes the Arsari Group will return the remaining funds. “We believe Arsari’s management will fulfill its obligation to return the remaining stolen funds,” the spokesperson said.

After reviewing the evidence and documents, Kush Amin, an attorney specializing in anti- corruption and anti-money laundering, said Srivastava should be held accountable for committing fraud in Indonesia, particularly for using Troost’s company funds to purchase a home in California.

“If he committed the underlying criminal offense, then he must also be held responsible for laundering the proceeds of that fraud from Indonesia. If those funds are linked to the ownership of the California house, he should also be liable for laundering money into the United States,” said the former legal specialist at Transparency International.

Hashim Djojohadikusumo did not respond to an interview request sent to the Arsari Group’s office on February 19, 2026. Aryo Djojohadikusumo, Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Arsari Group, also declined to comment and referred Tempo to Ariseno Ridhwan, spokesperson for both the Arsari Group and Hashim. Ariseno did not respond to letters or messages sent to his personal mobile phone from February through the publication of this report.

When approached at the Environment Ministry on April 29, 2026, Hashim declined to comment on Arsari’s involvement in the case surrounding Srivastava. “I don’t want to discuss that,” he said.

Srivastava also did not respond to questions sent to the email address listed on his personal website or to two public relations firms that had previously represented him. On his YouTube podcast, Srivastava described Troost’s account as “a big lie.”

In comments to the Financial Times, Srivastava claimed he had never presented himself as a CIA agent and suggested that recordings held by Troost had been fabricated by foreign actors. He also denied reports that the US$25 million he received from Paramount’s loan to Arsari came from a company owned by Hashim.

Meanwhile, Ivan Yustiavandana, Head of Indonesia’s Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (PPATK), said the agency was investigating the transaction together with its counterparts in other countries. According to Ivan, the PPATK reviews any matter that attracts public attention when suspicious activity has been flagged by the financial industry.

He said his team would submit its findings to law enforcement authorities if it uncovered evidence of money laundering in the transaction. “We are still waiting for a complete response from our counterparts overseas,” Ivan said on Tuesday, June 23, 2026. “We continue to coordinate with them,” he added.

With the legal case unfolding in California, Srivastava’s image as a CIA operative has begun to collapse. People have started distancing themselves from him. In the United States, former President Joe Biden returned donations from Srivastava after the story of the fake spy began to unravel.

As the Democratic Party distanced itself from him, Srivastava shifted toward the Republican Party, embracing the “America First” message championed by President Donald Trump. Since June 2025, he has appeared on conservative podcasts, delivered a speech at a political convention in Las Vegas, and posted a photograph of himself with Vice President James David Vance in June 2025.

Troost’s lawsuit in California, amended in June 2026, also revealed that Srivastava donated US$2 million to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the cultural institution in Washington, D.C., now managed by Trump. The lawsuit noted that the center was at one point renamed The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, a move that sparked controversy because it violated the institution’s governing rules.

Dirgantara Indonesia CEO Gita Amperiawan said he was relieved that the state-owned aerospace company did not proceed with its partnership with Srivastava’s company.

Defense industry sources in Indonesia said they were shocked when the alleged fraud came to light. Four Indonesian sources who knew Srivastava admitted they initially believed his claims of being a CIA officer, even though they also noticed numerous inconsistencies during their interactions with “Mr. G.”

Several of Srivastava’s business associates also said they felt they had been used to advance his personal interests.

What remains a mystery is the position of Prabowo Subianto and Hashim Djojohadikusumo. In the past, both appeared to believe many of Srivastava’s claims. As of the publication of this report, Tempo had not received a response from either of them.

Anand Mangnale, an independent journalist from India, was part of this investigation.

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

_{Indonesia President Prabowo Subianto (Banner: Mustafa Yalcin/Anadolu/Anadolu via AFP)}

_{Originally published in OCCRP on July 3, 2026. By Adil Al Hasan (Tempo), Anand Mangnale and Tom Allard (OCCRP). https://www.occrp.org/en/news/businessman-who-allegedly-posed-as-cia-agent-wooed-indonesian-president-and-his-brother}

A businessman who allegedly posed as a CIA agent cultivated a relationship with Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto — and secured preliminary agreements from Indonesia’s government to purchase tens of billions of dollars worth of fighter jets and other equipment.

The businessman, Gaurav Srivastava, did not respond to requests for comment on his Indonesian activities. On his website, Srivastava stated that accusations that he pretended to be a CIA agent were “gross fabrications” spread by his former business partner, Niels Troost, who was sanctioned by the U.K., European Union and Switzerland for trading Russian oil.

The sanctions have since been lifted by the E.U. and Switzerland.

Civil lawsuits filed by Troost in California and the Southern District of New York include references to recorded phone calls he collected as evidence in which Srivastava allegedly claimed to work for the CIA.

Srivastava joined Prabowo, then defence minister, in high-level meetings in Washington D.C. and Jakarta in 2020 where military procurement was discussed. He received three “Letters of Intention to Purchase” the same year.

The letters, obtained by OCCRP’s Indonesian partner Tempo, spelled out plans for the Indonesian government to acquire fighter jets and other defence materiel. Srivastava secured another letter of intent and a memorandum of understanding for two other defense procurement arrangements in 2021 and 2022.

None of the agreements ultimately resulted in purchases by the Indonesian government.

A spokesperson for Indonesia’s Ministry of Defense, Rico Sirait, confirmed the existence of the preliminary agreements, but stressed they did not constitute a binding contract.

“The entire process of Indonesian defense cooperation and procurement is always carried out with utmost caution, prioritizing the principles of good governance, national interest, and compliance with applicable mechanisms and regulations,” he told Tempo.

Troost said in an email to reporters that Srivastava claimed that he visited and stayed frequently at Prabowo’s homes when he was Indonesia’s defense minister.

Prabowo did not answer multiple requests for comment.

_{Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto (fourth from left), Gaurav Srivastava (sixth from left), and colleagues at the Indonesian Embassy in Washington, D.C., in October 2020. (Credit: Screenshot/Facebook/Indonesian Embassy in Washington, D.C.)}

Over the course of 2020 and 2022, companies owned by Srivastava secured five preliminary agreements from Indonesia’s Defense Ministry, and a state-owned defence company. Prabowo was photographed with Srivastava and the company’s chief executive at a signing ceremony. The agreement was later announced at a press conference with the CEO.

The proposed agreements covered 36 F-15 fighter jets, UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, and C-130 transport planes. In addition, one of Srivastava’s companies received a letter of intent to supply Indonesia’s defense ministry with a joint operations command and control center.

In 2022, the U.S. government announced its approval for the potential sale of 36 F-15 fighter jets along with their spare parts, which would have been worth $13.9 billion in total.

Corporate records show the four companies controlled by Srivastava that secured the five agreements were shell companies with no experience in defence procurement. All have since been deregistered after failing to pay tax. The announcement from the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency did not mention these companies.

Srivastava also developed ties with leading Indonesian business figures, including Hashim Djojohadikusumo, Prabowo’s brother, who chairs the Arsari Group.

Troost’s legal complaint explains that he was convinced Srivastava was a well-connected CIA operative, and he transferred 50 percent of his company to him believing he could help the business. Srivastava then “orchestrated” a $51-million loan from their company to the Arsari Group, the complaint says.

Troost claims Srivastava told him the $51-million loan would help fund a covert U.S. government program. However, according to the complaint, Srivastava allegedly convinced Arsari Group to transfer almost half the loan to him, and then used it to buy a $25-million mansion in Los Angeles.

According to the legal complaint, Srivastava tried to convince the Arsari Group to transfer the remainder of the loan to him, but the company refused.

Indonesia’s money laundering authority told Tempo it is looking into the transaction, and if they find evidence of wrongdoing they will refer it to law enforcement.

Hashim did not respond to requests for comment.

Although Srivastava did not reply to requests for comment, he has accused Troost on his website of perpetrating “an aggressive, scortched-earth [sic] disinformation campaign,” which began with legal complaints in the U.S., Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

For his part, in his California civil case, Troost calls Srivastava a “brazen con man of remarkable skill.”

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

_{Coal mining production in Dhanbad, India. (Banner: Hari Mahidhar/Alamy Stock Photo)}

_{Originally published in OCCRP on May 22, 2024. By Anand Mangnale (OCCRP), with additional reporting by the Financial Times, Ravi Nair, Prajwal Bhat and NBR Arcadio. https://www.occrp.org/en/investigation/new-evidence-bolsters-allegations-adani-group-overcharged-for-coal}

On January 9, 2014, the bulk carrier MV Kalliopi L docked at Ennore port in Chennai, the southern Indian city in Tamil Nadu, after a two-week voyage from Indonesia. It carried 69,925 metric tons of coal destined for the state’s power company.

However, the paperwork for the cargo took a more circuitous route, passing though the British Virgin Islands and Singapore.

During this journey, the price of the coal more than tripled to US$91.91 per metric ton. The quality also inexplicably changed from low-grade steam coal to the clean, high-quality version sought by power companies.

MV Kalliopi L’s profitable trip was not an isolated event. Documents obtained by OCCRP and shared with the Financial Times reveal that at least 24 other shipments that landed on the Tamil Nadu coast between January and October 2014 were originally priced as low- quality coal but ultimately sold by India’s Adani Group to the state’s power company for triple the cost.

The evidence comes from multiple sources, including invoices and banking documents from several jurisdictions, details of investigations by India’s Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), leaked documents from a key Indonesian coal supplier for Adani, and a trove of documents obtained from the Indian state-owned power company TANGEDCO (Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation).

While not definitive, the data adds strong new evidence to over-invoicing allegations against the politically powerful Adani Group, which is perceived as close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and is India’s largest importer and private producer of coal.

The DRI, an agency under the Ministry of Finance, opened an investigation nearly a decade ago into whether Adani Group and other companies had used offshore intermediaries to inflate the price of coal supplied to utilities. But the probe was prevented from progressing in 2019 after Adani won a case in the High Court of Bombay that blocked the DRI from seeking details about shipments, including the types of invoices OCCRP has obtained, from abroad. The DRI then appealed to India’s Supreme Court, where the case has languished without progress.

Last year, opposition politicians called for a new investigation after the Financial Times reported that the Adani Group appeared to have paid over US$5 billion to middlemen for coal imported far in excess of market prices between 2021-2023.

The alleged overpricing would not only burden ordinary Indians with inflated fuel costs. Burning lower quality coal also produces more pollution, a scourge responsible for more than 1.6 million deaths in India in 2019, according to a recent study published in the Lancet.

_{Air pollution in Kolkata, India. (Credit: Indranil Aditya/NurPhoto/Alamy Stock Photo)}

“The implications are that you have overpaid for the fuel, the second implication is that you need to burn more coal for every unit of electricity you produce, which results in more fly ash, and more pollution,” said Tim Buckley, founder and director of Australia-based Climate Energy Finance, who is a leading authority on energy financing and its implications. “More pollution and more energy poverty for the poorest people in India.”

Arappor Iyakkam, a Tamil Nadu-based NGO that has been fighting for accountability in the alleged coal scam, estimates the state’s power company TANGEDCO overpaid Rs 6,000 crore (US$720 million at today’s exchange rate) for coal from all vendors between 2012- 2016, during which nearly half the value of its tenders were given to Adani, according to the organization. The NGO filed a complaint against TANGEDCO in 2018 with the state anti-corruption agency.

When asked about OCCRP’s findings, an Adani spokesperson denied the allegations as “false and baseless.”

“The suggestion that Adani Global Pte Ltd supplied to TANGEDCO inferior coal, as compared to the quality standards laid down in the tender and PO [purchase order], is incorrect,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “While it is difficult for us to comment on individual cases due to the sheer volume of data and the elapsed time, not to add the contractual and legal obligations, it is important to note that the coal supplied, irrespective of the declaration by the supplier, is tested for quality at the receiving plant.”

The Adani spokesperson rejected Arappor Iyakkam’s analysis and any responsibility for India’s air pollution or losses incurred by state power companies.

“By no stretch of imagination can Adani Global Pte Ltd, with a total supply of less than 2% of the coal burnt by TANGEDCO in the relevant period, be held responsible for either air pollution or the losses of [power distribution companies].”

TANGEDCO did not respond to questions sent by OCCRP.

One Shipment, Multiple Invoices

The documents obtained by reporters track how both the price — and in the case of the MV Kalliopi L — the quality of the coal imported by Adani increased as it moved between companies.

Shortly after the vessel began its journey, the provincial office in the Indonesian port city of Banjarmasin issued a certificate of origin in January 2014 identifying the Indonesia mining group Jhonlin as the consignor and TANGEDCO as the consignee of the coal onboard.

The certificate did not mention the calorific value of the coal — which measures how much energy is produced when the coal is burned and is an indication of its quality. But leaked data from Jhonlin listed the price for this shipment at US$28 per metric ton, which corresponds to the market value of the low-end coal Jhonlin was selling at the time.

Before reaching TANGEDCO, the paperwork for the shipment passed through a middleman: Supreme Union Investors Ltd, a company registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands.

This company issued an invoice for the same shipment to Adani Global PTE Singapore — the group’s regional headquarters — that listed the unit price as US$33.75 per metric ton, and the quality as “below 3500” kilocalories per kilogram (kcal/kg), which is considered low grade.

But when Adani Global issued its invoice to TANGEDCO for the shipment a little over a month later, everything had changed. The unit price shot up dramatically to US$91.91 per metric ton and the coal was listed as having a calorific value of 6,000 kcal/kg, a high quality form relatively free of impurities.

Same coal, different prices

Documents show how the price and quality of the same shipment of coal increased as it changed hands.

A certificate of origin issued in Indonesia shows the coal was supplied by the Indonesia mining group Jhonlin. Leaked data from the miner listed the price as US$28 per metric ton.

A commercial invoice issued by Supreme Union Investors to Adani Global lists the price of the same shipment at US$33.75 per metric ton, and describes the quality as below 3,500 kcal/kg.

A commercial invoice from Adani to TANGEDCO shows Adani supplied the same coal to the state power company for the price of US$91.91 per metric ton, with the quality listed as 6,000 kcal/kg.

Reporters verified two dozen other coal deliveries from 2014 that follow the same pattern, with Adani earning large margins on every shipment.

According to the leaked Jhonlin data, the Indonesia miner initially supplied the shipments to Supreme Union Investors for an average price of US$28 per metric ton, a cost consistent with low-end bulk steam coal.

But records from TANGEDCO show these shipments were ultimately supplied by Adani under the contracted quality of 6,000-kcal/kg and the price of US$91 per metric ton of coal.

Though reporters were unable to obtain all original invoices, they were able to confirm the 24 shipments were the same in the export and import datasets by matching the ship, weight, and shipment dates.

Supreme Union Investors did not respond to requests to comment.

_{Barge loaded with piles of coal on the Mahakam River in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. (Credit: Pacific Imagica/Alamy Stock Photo)}

In a response to reporters, Adani’s spokesperson said the shipments were tested for quality at multiple points in the process.

“With the supplied coal having passed such an elaborate quality check process by multiple agencies at multiple points, clearly the allegation of supply of low-quality coal is not only baseless and unfair but completely absurd,” the spokesperson said.

Jhonlin did not respond to questions from OCCRP, but the miner is primarily known as a supplier of low and medium-grade steam coal, which is also supported by its own data. The dataset from Jhonlin that was leaked to OCCRP includes more than two million documents from between 2012 and 2022, including contracts, supply data, negotiations, emails, and other documents detailing the Indonesian company’s activities. Reporters could not find any example of Jhonlin providing coal with a calorific value above 4,200 kcal/kg — far below the higher quality 6,000-calorie coal which TANGEDCO ordered.

Adani’s spokesperson said that if the coal delivered had been found to be of a lower quality than what was stipulated in the contract, which allowed for a range of between 5,800 and 6,700 kcal/kg, the payment would have been reduced accordingly.

According to commercially available trade data, Financial Times journalists identified 22 of the 24 shipments and found the final payment price varied between US$87 and US$91 per metric ton, indicating that only small adjustments, if any, may have been made.

According to one Indian analyst, power generators in the country have “faced coal quality problems for decades.”

“Given the market power of coal suppliers, they often don’t have a choice but to accept grade slippage,” Rohit Chandra, assistant professor of public policy at IIT Delhi, told the Financial Times. “Third party testing has done very little to address these concerns.”

Justice Delayed

The data obtained by reporters reveals patterns similar to what the DRI described in a 2016 notice about an industry-wide case it had launched against several Adani Group companies and other firms for alleged manipulation of coal prices and calorific value.

_{Protesters took to the streets in Kolkata, India in 2023 following another Adani Group scandal, in which a U.S. short-seller accused the conglomerate of stock manipulation. (Credit: Sayantan Chakraborty/Pacific Press via ZUMA Press Wire/Alamy Stock Photo)}

The agency suspected that the coal was shipped directly from Indonesian ports to India, while the accompanying import invoices took convoluted paths. They were channeled through one or more intermediaries in global hubs such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, and the British Virgin Islands, before being issued to the buyer by Adani Global.

In the 2016 notice, the DRI wrote that “in a significant number of cases” two sets of test reports were discovered for consignments: “one showing lower gross calorific value (GVC) and the other higher GVC.”

But its effort to seek more information about shipments in other jurisdictions was thwarted by Adani in court.

At the request of the DRI, a Mumbai court had issued formal requests in 2017 to courts in Hong Kong, Switzerland, UAE, and Singapore, seeking help in accessing information held by Adani subsidiaries, including the details of several shipments, their associated invoices, and proof of payments.

However, Adani Group challenged the DRI’s requests to obtain its business records the following year. The Bombay High Court ruled in Adani’s favor, forcing the DRI to rescind the requests.

The DRI appealed the order to India’s Supreme Court and the case has moved at a glacial pace ever since, with Adani reportedly taking three years to file a counter affidavit to the DRI’s appeal. The next hearing is scheduled for August 6.

Additional reporting by the Financial Times, Ravi Nair (OCCRP), Prajwal Bhat (OCCRP), and NBR Arcadio.

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Message us securely on Signal

_{Originally published in OCCRP on August 31, 2023. By Anand Mangnale, Ravi Nair and NBR Arcadio. https://www.occrp.org/en/investigation/documents-provide-fresh-insight-into-allegations-of-stock-manipulation-that-rocked-indias-powerful-adani-group}

Key Findings

Neither India’s stock market regulator nor a high-level expert committee has been able to prove what many suspect: that some foreign owners of publicly listed Adani Group stock are, in fact, fronts for its majority owners. Fresh allegations aired this January by American short sellers rocked the conglomerate, but offshore secrecy has made tracing the transactions difficult. Official investigators “hit a wall,” in the words of one report.

Now, new documents obtained by reporters reveal two men who spent years trading hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Adani Group stock: Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli and Chang Chung-Ling. Both have close ties to the Adani family, including appearing as directors and shareholders in affiliated companies. Records show that the investment funds they used to trade in Adani Group stock received instructions from a company controlled by a senior member of the Adani family.

It became one of the largest economic scandals in the history of modern India: The Adani Group, a massive conglomerate with interests in everything from airports to television stations, was accused of brazen stock manipulation.

The allegation, leveled this January by a New York-based short seller, caused Adani stock to plummet, triggered protests, and prompted an investigation by India’s Supreme Court.

But the expert committee convened by the court was unable to get to the bottom of the scandal, which has serious political implications because of the group’s widely perceived closeness to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and its central role in his plan for developing the country.

_{Credit: Enrique Shore/Alamy Live News Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum 2019 at the Plaza hotel in New York City.}

The essence of the allegations was that some of the Adani Group’s key “public” investors were in fact Adani insiders, a possible violation of Indian securities law. But none of the agencies contacted by the committee were able to identify those investors, since they were hidden behind secretive offshore structures.

Now, exclusive documents obtained by OCCRP and shared with The Guardian and Financial Times — including files from multiple tax havens, bank records, and internal Adani Group emails — shed light on that very matter.

These documents, which have been corroborated by people with direct knowledge of the Adani Group’s business and public records from multiple countries, show how hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in publicly traded Adani stock through opaque investment funds based in the island nation of Mauritius.

In at least two cases — representing Adani stock holdings that at one point reached $430 million — the mysterious investors turn out to have widely reported ties to the group’s majority shareholders, the Adani family.

The two men, Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli and Chang Chung-Ling, have longtime business ties to the family and have also served as directors and shareholders in Adani Group companies and companies associated with one of the family’s senior members, Vinod Adani.

The documents show that, through the Mauritius funds, they spent years buying and selling Adani stock through offshore structures that obscured their involvement — and made considerable profits in the process. They also show that the management company in charge of their investments paid a Vinod Adani company to advise them in their investments.

The question of whether this arrangement is a violation of the law rests on whether Ahli and Chang should be considered to be acting on behalf of Adani “promoters,” a term used in India to refer to the majority owners of a business holding and its affiliated parties. If so, their stake in the Adani Group would mean that insiders altogether owned more than the 75 percent allowed by law.

“When the company buys its own shares above 75 percent … it’s not just illegal, but it’s share price manipulation,” says Arun Agarwal, an Indian market specialist and transparency advocate. “This way the company [creates] artificial scarcity, and thus increases its share value — and thus its own market capitalization.”

“This helps them gain an image that they are doing very well, which helps them get loans, take valuations of companies to a new high, and then float new companies,” he said.

In response to requests for comment for this story, a representative of the Adani Group noted that the Mauritius funds investigated by reporters had already been named in the “Hindenburg report,” referring to the short-seller that sparked this year’s scandal. (The report did name these offshore companies, but did not reveal who was using them to make investments in Adani stock.)

The Adani representative also cited the Supreme Court’s expert committee, which described a financial regulator’s efforts to get to the bottom of the matter as “not proved.”

“In light of these facts,these allegations are not only baseless and unsubstantiated but are rehashed from Hindenburg’s allegations,” the representative wrote. “Further, it is categorically stated that all the Adani Group’s publicly listed entities are in compliance with all applicable laws including the regulation relating to public share holdings.”

_{Credit: Ashish Vaishnav/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai lit up in the Indian tricolor flag to celebrate the country’s 75th year of independence.}

Ahli and Chang did not respond to OCCRP’s requests for comment.

In an interview with a reporter from the Guardian, Chang said he knew nothing about any secret purchases of Adani stock. He did not say whether he had bought any, but asked why journalists were not interested in his other investments. “We are a simple business,” he said, before ending the interview.

Vinod Adani did not respond to requests for comment. Though the Adani Group has denied that he has a role in running the conglomerate, it admitted this March that he was part of its “promoter group” — meaning he had control over the affairs of the company and was meant to be informed of all holdings in Adani Group stock. An Adani Group representative told reporters that Vinod Adani’s involvement had been “duly disclosed,” adding that he is a “foreign national … residing abroad for the last three decades,” and “does not hold any managerial position in any Adani listed entities or their subsidiaries.”

‘Brazen Stock Manipulation’

The Adani Group’s rise has been staggering, growing from under $8 billion in market capitalization in September 2013 — the year before Modi became prime minister — to $260 billion last year.

The conglomerate is active in a dizzying array of fields, including transportation and logistics, natural gas distribution, coal trade and production, power generation and transmission, road construction, data centers, and real estate.

_{Credit: Ashish Vaishnav/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire Women walk past the Adani electricity logo on a wall in Mumbai.}

It has also won many of the state’s largest tenders, including 50-year contracts to operate or redevelop a number of India’s airports. Recently, it even took a controlling stake in one of the country’s last independent television stations.

But Adani’s rise has not been without controversy. Opposition politicians allege that the firm has received preferential treatment from the government to secure its lucrative state contracts. Analysts also describe its chairman, Gautam Adani, as benefiting from a cozy relationship with Modi. Adani has denied that Modi or his policies are responsible for his business empire’s success.

The conglomerate suffered a major setback at the end of January when the New York- based short seller, Hindenburg Research, issued its scathing report, claiming that the group had spent decades engaged in “brazen stock manipulation” and “accounting fraud.”

Gautam Adani, the headline read, was “pulling the largest con in corporate history.”

The central issue, the report claimed, was that the company was in violation of Indian securities law, which requires at least 25 percent of the stock of any publicly traded company to be available to the public for purchase.

Following the report’s publication, shares in the group’s companies plummeted. Gautam Adani lost more than $60 billion in just a few days, dropping from third-richest man in the world to 24th.

_{Credit: ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Live News Protestors call for accountability in Kolkata on March 13, 2023 after the Hindenburg report accused the Adani Group of stock manipulation.}

In response, the Adani Group issued denials and wrapped itself in the Indian flag. “This is not merely an unwarranted attack on any specific company,” the Group wrote in a note to stakeholders, “but a calculated attack on India, the independence, integrity, and quality of Indian institutions, and the growth story and ambition of India.”

Many investors appear to have bought this narrative, with shares of major Adani group companies recovering much of their losses.

Hitting a Wall

Meanwhile, in response to the Hindenburg report, India’s Supreme Court convened an expert committee to look into the allegations. The committee’s conclusions, published this May, revealed that the Adani Group had already been investigated by SEBI, the Indian financial regulator.

According to the committee, SEBI had suspected for years that “some of [the Adani Group’s] public shareholders are not truly public shareholders and they could be fronts for [Adani Group] promoters.” In 2020, it launched an investigation into 13 overseas entities holding Adani stock.

But the investigation “hit a wall,” the expert committee’s report reads, because SEBI investigators could not conclusively determine who was behind the money.

Attempting to do so would be a “journey without a destination,” the committee concluded, because multiple layers of opaque corporate ownership could be used to disguise the ultimate owners of the stock.

Documents obtained by reporters do, however, reveal the “destination” in two cases involving two of the 13 offshore entities: A pair of Mauritius-based investment funds.

From the outside these funds, called Emerging India Focus Fund (EIFF) and EM Resurgent Fund (EMRF), appear to be typical offshore investment vehicles, operated on behalf of a number of wealthy investors.

Documents obtained by reporters show that a large percentage of the money was placed into these funds by two foreign investors — Chang from Taiwan and Ahli from the United Arab Emirates — who used them to trade large amounts of shares in four Adani companies between 2013 and 2018.

At one point in March 2017, the value of the investments in Adani Group stock was $430 million.

The money followed a convoluted trail, making it exceedingly difficult to follow. It was channeled through four companies and a Bermuda-based investment fund called the Global Opportunities Fund (GOF).

The Four Companies

The four companies used in the investments were Lingo Investment Ltd (BVI), owned by Chang; Gulf Arij Trading FZE (UAE), owned by Ahli; Mid East Ocean Trade (Mauritius), of which Ahli was the beneficial owner; and Gulf Asia Trade & Investment Ltd (BVI), of which Ahli was the “controlling person.”

According to documents obtained by reporters, these investments resulted in significant profits, netting hundreds of millions over the years as EIFF and EMRF repeatedly bought Adani stock low and sold it high.

Between them, at the peak of their investment in June 2016, the two funds held free- floating shares of four Adani Group companies ranging from 8 to nearly 14 percent: Adani Power, Adani Enterprises, Adani Ports, and Adani Transmissions.

Chang and Ahli’s connections to the Adani family have been widely reported over the years. The men were linked to the family in two separate government investigations into alleged wrongdoing by the Adani Group. Both cases were eventually dismissed.

The first case involved a 2007 investigation into an allegedly illegal diamond trading scheme by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), India’s premier investigative agency under the Ministry of Finance. A DRI report described Chang as the director of three Adani companies involved in the scheme, while Ahli represented a trading firm that was also involved. As part of the case, it was revealed that Chang shared a Singapore residential address with Vinod Adani, the low-profile older brother of the Adani Group’s chairman, Gautam Adani.

The second case was an alleged over-invoicing scam revealed in a separate 2014 DRI investigation. The agency claimed that Adani Group companies were illegally funneling money out of India by overpaying their own foreign subsidiary by as much as $1 billion for imported power generation equipment.

Here, too, Chang and Ahli’s names appeared. At separate times, the two men were directors of two companies later owned by Vinod Adani that handled the proceeds from the scheme, one in the UAE and one in Mauritius.

According to the Hindenburg report, Chang was also either a director or shareholder in a Singapore company that was listed as a “related party” in a disclosure by an Adani company.

Direct Instructions

Aside from these past links to the Adanis, there is evidence that Chang and Ahli’s trading in Adani stock was coordinated with the family.

According to a source familiar with the Adani Group’s business who cannot be named to ensure their safety, the fund managers in charge of Chang and Ahli’s investments in EIFF and EMRF received direct instructions on the investments from an Adani company.

The company that the source named, Excel Investment and Advisory Services Limited, is based in a secretive offshore zone in the United Arab Emirates where corporate records are not available.

However, documents obtained by reporters corroborate the source’s account:

• An agreement for Excel to provide advisory services to EIFF and EMRF was signed for Excel by Vinod Adani himself in 2011.

• As recently as 2015, Excel was owned by a company called Assent Trade & Investment Pvt Ltd., which a 2016 email stated was ultimately owned by Vinod Adani and his wife.

• Though current corporate records from Mauritius, where Assent is registered, do not show who owns the company, they do show that Vinod Adani is on its board of directors.

• Invoices and transaction records show that the management companies of EIFF, EMRF, and the Bermuda-based GOF paid over $1.4 million in “advisory” fees to Excel between June 2012 and August 2014.

• An internal email exchange suggests that, in connection with an upcoming audit, fund managers were concerned that they didn’t have sufficient paperwork to justify following Excel’s investment advice. In one of the emails, a manager instructs several employees to produce records that would justify the reasoning behind the investments. In another, a manager makes a request to obtain a report from Excel which should recommend investing in “more than the number of securities into which the fund has [actually] invested so that it can be demonstrated that the [investment manager] used their discretion to make the selection of investments.”

‘Siphoned-off money’

There is no evidence that Chang and Ahli’s money for their Adani Group investments came from the Adani family. The source of the funds is unknown.

But documents obtained by OCCRP show that Vinod Adani used one of the same Mauritius funds to make his own investments.

Reporters obtained a letter SEBI, the Indian regulator, received from the DRI in 2014, in which the DRI said it had evidence that money from the alleged over-invoicing scheme it were investigating had been sent to Mauritius.

_{Credit: Dinodia Photos RM The Securities and Exchange Board (SEBI) building in Mumbai.}

“There are indications that a part of the siphoned-off money may have found its way to stock markets in India as investment and disinvestment in the Adani Group,” wrote Najib Shah, the DRI’s director general at the time, in the letter.

According to the DRI case, money from the alleged scheme was sent to an Emirati company called Electrogen Infra FZE. This company then forwarded the resulting proceeds of about $1 billion to a Mauritius-based holding company ultimately owned by Vinod Adani that had a similar name, Electrogen Infra Holding Pvt. Ltd.

Reporters were able to trace the onward flow of over $100 million of these funds.

The Mauritius company loaned the money to another Vinod Adani company, Assent Trade & Investment Pvt Ltd, “to invest in [the] Asian equity market.”

As the beneficial owner of both Electrogen Infra Holding and Assent, Vinod Adani signed the loan document as both the lender and as the borrower.

Finally, the money was placed into the GOF, the same intermediary used by Chang and Ahli, and then invested in both EIFF and Asia Vision Fund, another Mauritius-based investment vehicle.

SEBI did not respond to reporters’ requests for comment about the letter it received in 2014.

In the wake of the Hindenburg allegations this year, in addition to appointing its expert committee, India’s Supreme Court directed SEBI to investigate. Its report is due next month.

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Key findings

• In April 2021 Maharashtra’s environment authority ruled the jetty and plant “cannot be treated as independent projects”.

• The environment ministry cleared them through two committees, almost nine months apart, and filed the plant in a state-level category.

• The plant’s papers record no forest land. The jetty takes 0.6497 hectares of mangrove reserved forest.

• The coastal authority told the company to look for another site because of the mangroves, then recommended the same one.

One project, in the state’s words

On 23 April 2021, Maharashtra’s State Environment Impact Assessment Authority sent its answer to Adani Cementation Ltd. The company had brought it a cement grinding unit at Shahbaj, near Alibag in Raigad district, as a standalone plant of the kind the state clears on its own.

The authority refused to see it that way. The plant and the company’s planned jetty on the Amba river “are interdependent activities”, it wrote, and “cannot be treated as independent projects”.

It told the company to take both to the environment ministry in Delhi “as an integrated project”, in Category A. That is the class reserved for projects with the widest impact, which the centre must judge as a whole.

The state authority’s ruling, as the plant’s environmental clearance of 13 September 2024 quotes it.

But Delhi split the file. On 29 December 2023 the ministry cleared the jetty on the advice of its infrastructure committee. On 13 September 2024, almost nine months later, it cleared the plant on the advice of a separate committee for industry.

The summary box on the plant’s clearance records it as Category B1, a state-level class. The state had asked for one file in the top category. It got two letters, and one of them still carries a B.

The category box on page 1 of the plant’s environmental clearance, 13 September 2024.

The split decided what each letter had to look at. Read alone, the plant’s papers say “No involvement of Forest Land” and record no water body within the site.

The jetty, cleared on the same impact study, stands in the Amba estuary and takes 0.6497 hectares of mangrove reserved forest, about 69,933 square feet. Everything that touched the river went into one letter. The plant the jetty exists to serve arrived in the other looking clean.

The company belongs to the Adani Group, whose “widely perceived closeness to Prime Minister Narendra Modi” OCCRP has described. The creek it is building on feeds fishing families from Shahbaj, Shahapur and Dhamanpada. Among the cargo the jetty is cleared to handle is coal.

The site that never moved

The April 2021 ruling was the second warning a Maharashtra authority had given. The first came from the coastal regulator, nine months before it.

In October 2019 the state’s mangrove cell inspected the land the jetty would cross. It found “a dense mangrove dominated by Avicennia marina”, the grey mangrove, on plots listed as reserve forest.

On 7 July 2020 the Maharashtra Coastal Zone Management Authority decided the company “need to explore other site for the project activities”. The reason it gave was “the existence of mangroves at the site”.

The coastal authority records its own July 2020 instruction. Minutes of its 149th meeting, 4 December 2020, page 14.

The company came back with six sites. Every one of them crossed mangrove reserved forest, for 410 to 650 metres, and the company ranked the shortest crossing first.

Five months after its instruction, on 4 December 2020, the same authority recommended the project to the ministry. The application the company filed later lists the very plots the mangrove cell had inspected.

The authority also took the company’s word on fishing. Citing the company’s study, it recorded that “there will not be any impact for fishermen”.

A hearing for each half

On 18 April 2022 villagers gathered in a hall at Poynad, in Alibag taluka, for the public hearing on the jetty. One of them objected that “two public hearings have been kept in a single day”. Project officers said the jetty application dated from 2018 and the cement one from 2021.

A speaker from Pen asked why the coastal authority had approved a site it once said the project should leave. The company’s own project officer confirmed the instruction. The authority had “directed us in its 145th meeting to think about other alternative sites”, he told the panel.

“There are not 150 mangroves, but 1,50,000 mangroves,” a man from Kamalpada said.

By the end of the day the panel held 190 written suggestions and objections. The convener sent them on with the minutes.

The count of written submissions, above the panel’s signatures. Public hearing minutes, 18 April 2022.

The company says it answered them in an annexure to its impact report. The plant’s committee later called its action plan on the hearing “satisfactory”.

Two letters, two sets of gaps

Dr Amardeep Raju, member secretary of the infrastructure committee, signed the jetty clearance. It allows about 158 trees to be affected and 60,000 cubic metres of dredging in the river, with up to 30,000 more if the berths silt up.

The jetty clearance of 29 December 2023 on the mangrove reserved forest and the trees, page 3.

Dinesh Runiwal, a ministry director, signed the plant clearance. It cites a 2010 ministry memo that lets each sector committee appraise its own part of a shared impact report. The split rests on that memo. The state authority had asked for a single appraisal of the whole.

The plant letter went out with large gaps. The project needed 10 hectares, of which the company held 3.24, and the other 6.76 “will be acquired soon”. The committee counted 13 highly protected species nearby and said the wildlife plan should be carried out “post approval”.

Two months later a corrigendum rewrote the letter. The plant’s cost rose from Rs 547.19 crore to Rs 990 crore, and its jobs fell from 900 to 415. The ministry called these “minor typographical errors”.

Cleared by the courts, still two files

To cut the mangroves, the company went to the Bombay High Court. The state and central authorities, the bench recorded, “have not opposed the Project”. The company’s own consultant had warned that cement and fly ash settling on the trees “may result in killing of the existing mangroves”.

The Bombay Environmental Action Group argued that a captive jetty serves one company. The bench was “not at all impressed”. Shipping cement by water, it held, would cut “carbon emission by more than 60%”. On 5 March 2025 it allowed 158 mangrove trees and shrubs to be cut.

The judgment describes the coastal authority’s July 2020 meeting as a request for documents. It does not mention the instruction to look for another site, or the state authority’s ruling that the jetty and plant were one project.

On 21 July 2025 the Supreme Court said it was “not inclined to interfere”, in a short order that gives no reasons. The final central forest approval followed on 24 October 2025, 11 days after the state filed its compliance report. In August 2026 the state forest department issued orders permitting the diversion, the Indian Express reported.

The company now wants its permits moved to a new name, Adani Cement Industries Ltd. On 5 September 2026 the state pollution board refused to move two of the site’s construction consents, because the certificate attached “does not reflect any change of name”.

The environmental clearances are travelling on two separate transfer files, one for the jetty and one for the plant. On 15 July 2026 the ministry’s portal showed both waiting on the company for more information, with no grant date.

The documents this story is based on, the clearances, orders, agendas and filings, are collected in one place.

→ The documents behind this story — add your DocumentCloud link

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Key findings

• Two Mauritius funds held up to 3.90% of four Adani companies from 2013 to 2018, counted as public shares.

• Counted with the promoters, they would have pushed two of the companies below the 25% public floor in March 2017.

• SEBI holds that Vinod Adani was in “de jure control” of the adviser hired for the funds’ main investors, yet finds “no footprint” of him in their investments.

• The companies settled at 6:04 pm on 28 September 2026. At 7:37 pm the same SEBI member ruled the breach “not established”.

Ninety-three minutes

At 6:04 pm on 28 September 2026, Kamlesh Chandra Varshney, a whole-time member of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), digitally signed a settlement order. Adani Enterprises, Adani Power, Adani Ports and Adani Transmission had each paid Rs 37,05,000, jointly with their directors, Gautam Adani among them. They paid “without admitting or denying the facts and conclusions of law”.

At 7:37 pm Varshney signed the final order in the same case. The companies’ breach of the public shareholding rule, it ruled, was “not established”. Its second page still reads “settled vide order dated [Insert Order date]”. Nobody had filled it in.

But the order also records what its verdict leaves out. “I hold that the Noticee no. 1 was in de jure control of ARFT,” Varshney wrote. Noticee no. 1 is Vinod Adani, Gautam Adani’s elder brother. ARFT is his family trust in the Cayman Islands. It owned Excel Investment and Advisory Services, the firm hired to advise on the money behind two funds that held Adani shares as members of the public.

The next paragraph begins: “Having concluded that Mr. Vinod Adani effectively controlled Excel.” De jure means by law.

Varshney’s finding that Vinod Adani was in de jure control of the trust that owned Excel. SEBI final order, page 38.

That was the heart of the charge. SEBI’s investigators had alleged that the shares counted as public were bought at Vinod Adani’s direction and controlled by him. These are the companies of a group “widely perceived” as close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as a 2023 OCCRP investigation put it.

A line at 25%

Every listed company in India must keep at least a quarter of its shares with the public. Its promoters, meaning the founding family and the companies it controls, may hold no more than 75%. The point, the order says, is “price discovery through market participation”.

From 2013 to 2018, two Mauritius funds, Emerging India Focus Funds (EIFF) and EM Resurgent Fund (EMR), sat on the public side of four Adani companies. At their peak they held 3.90% of Adani Power, 3.77% of Adani Transmission, 3.38% of Adani Enterprises and 2.99% of Adani Ports.

Small stakes, but they sat right on the line. In March 2017 Adani Transmission reported its promoters at 74.92% and the public at 25.08%, with EIFF at 2.47% and EMR at 1.17%. Move the two funds to the promoter side and the public falls to 21.44%. Adani Enterprises, in the same quarter, falls from 25.08% to 22.57%.

Adani Transmission’s public shareholders in March 2017, with the two funds at 1.17% and 2.47% and the public at 25.08%. BSE shareholding pattern.

Below the line, SEBI’s own 2017 rules bite. The stock exchange fines the company Rs 5,000 a day, rising to Rs 10,000 a day after a year, and freezes every share the promoters hold. It “may also consider compulsory delisting”.

The money behind the funds

SEBI opened its investigation on 23 October 2020 and traced the funds’ money back to its start.

It began with Daboul Trading, owned by the Emirati businessman Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli. On 1 September 2010 Daboul lent $350 million to Lingo Investment, which the Taiwanese businessman Chang Chung-Ling had set up eight days earlier. In May 2011 Daboul lent $400 million to a company Ahli had set up six days before. Two more Ahli companies made four investors.

The four put their money into Global Opportunities Fund in Bermuda, which invested through EIFF and EMR. The Bermuda fund had 478 investors. By the investigators’ count, these four supplied 99.49% of EIFF’s Adani money and 99.79% of EMR’s. Together the two funds put about Rs 3,302 crore into the four Adani companies.

From 1 April 2012 the fund’s manager hired Excel to advise on investments for three of the four. The contract also let Excel advise, on written request, “whether and in what manner the rights conferred by the investments shall be exercised”. In plain words, how to vote the shares. Vinod Adani was the settlor, enforcer and beneficiary of the trust that owned Excel, and could remove its trustee.

SEBI’s own chart of the structure, from Daboul’s loans through the Bermuda fund to the four Adani companies, with Excel and Vinod Adani beside the fund manager. SEBI final order, page 34.

What SEBI ruled, and what its order records

SEBI accepted that Vinod Adani controlled Excel. Then it read the contract. Excel’s advice was “non-binding”, and one clause said Excel would not advise on companies “within its Group or to whom it is associated with/to”. The investigators had not discussed these clauses, the order says, so “the alleged chain of control substantially breaks at this stage”. It does not ask whether a firm owned by an Adani brother’s trust was associated with Adani companies.

It went further. “There is also no footprint of him being involved in the decision” of the two funds to invest in Adani companies, the order says. OCCRP had reported in 2023 that Vinod Adani himself signed, for Excel, an agreement to advise EIFF and EMR. The funds’ managers paid Excel over $1.4 million in fees between 2012 and 2014.

SEBI’s finding of “no footprint” of Vinod Adani in the funds’ decision to invest. SEBI final order, page 42.

The funds voted with the promoters on related-party deals and on reappointing promoter directors. That “voting alignment”, the order held, could not “by itself establish control”.

The two men behind the money were fined Rs 20 lakh each. Ahli did not answer SEBI’s summons. Chang told SEBI he had no connection with the Adani promoters, though the investigators alleged he and Vinod Adani had sat together as directors of Adani Global from 1997 to 2008. The order calls his denial, with his failure to say where his money came from, a “deliberate attempt to mislead investigation”. Their ties to Vinod Adani, it says, “would only establish close business and financial relationship”.

The order rests on a legal test. Control means the power to “positively direct” a company’s decisions, and proving it was the investigators’ job. Nobody has shown where the money started. OCCRP found no evidence that it came from the Adani family, but found that Vinod Adani used the same Bermuda fund and EIFF for his own investments.

And SEBI’s charge sheet, the show cause notice, never claimed the money was his. It “does not allege that Mr. Vinod Adani is the beneficial owner” of the funds’ investments, the order says. That “could have been alleged”. “If that had been the allegation and there were evidences to prove the same, the situation could have been different.”

The price of a breach not established

The investigators put the wrongful gains earned through the structure at Rs 1,983.97 crore. The order held those gains not established. SEBI says a “sufficiently higher settlement price” deters wrongdoing. It took Rs 37,05,000 from each company for a breach that, in its own words, “does not stand established”.

The next day Adani Enterprises told the stock exchanges that the settlement had “no material financial impact”.

The order finds that the facts “may legitimately give rise to suspicion warranting further examination.” Its directions order none.

The documents this story is based on, the clearances, orders, agendas and filings, are collected in one place.

→ The documents behind this story — add your DocumentCloud link

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Key findings

• Fourteen forest approvals for Adani-linked projects in five states cover 11,421 hectares of forest land. Nearly 6,900 hectares are for coal mines.

• At Mundra, Kutch’s forest chief wrote there was “no need” for more forest. The ministry approved 1,576.81 hectares in 2018, without the limits its expert committee had set that January.

• At Dhirauli, the ministry called a forest “such pristine area” in February 2024. It gave final approval for a coal mine there in May 2025.

• In Hasdeo in 2011, a minister overruled the expert committee that did “not recommend the diversion”.

On 16 November 2018, the environment ministry in Delhi gave in-principle approval to divert 1,576.81 hectares of reserved forest at Mundra, on the Kutch coast. The land was for an industrial park inside the special economic zone of Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone.

But the forest department in Kutch had already said there was no need. Its chief conservator wrote that the company “has already diverted the reserved forest of 2008.41 ha for the same cause”. So, he concluded, “there is no need for any diversion of forest land for the same cause”.

Those 2,008.41 hectares had gone to the company in a final approval of 30 September 2009. It was then still called Mundra Port and Special Economic Zone.

He also asked that 394.10 hectares at Siracha be left out, as “the unique prominent Acacia nilotica forest in the district”. The state government had asked to keep 100 hectares there for birds and wolves. When ministry officers inspected in 2017, the company said it wanted Siracha to expand its power plant. The officers called it “good forest”, and recommended giving it anyway.

The Kutch forest chief’s recommendation, quoted in the ministry’s 2018 file note on the Mundra proposal: no need for more forest, and keep Siracha’s Acacia forest out.

The two Mundra approvals are the largest of 14 forest approvals for Adani-linked projects, traced through the government’s own letters. Together they cover 11,421 hectares in Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Jharkhand, from 2009 to July 2026, our analysis shows.

Nearly 6,900 of those hectares are for coal mines. About 7,500 were approved after Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014. OCCRP has reported on the group’s “widely perceived closeness” to him.

The count is permission to clear, not trees already felled. It is also a floor. It leaves out approvals under 90 hectares, and mines where no document shows Adani’s role.

Forest land approved for diversion to Adani-linked projects, by approval. Source: our analysis of the ministry’s approval letters.

“No need for any diversion”

The Mundra file shows how far the ministry moved. In 2016 its inspectors found no plan showing what the forest was for. So they could not establish whether the company had sought the “bare minimum”. The district collector’s certificate on forest dwellers’ rights had not been furnished.

The proposal, from 2004, counted 579,497 trees to be felled. Most of the growth was Prosopis juliflora, an invasive weed from Mexico, the inspectors noted.

In January 2018 the Forest Advisory Committee, the ministry’s expert panel, recommended 1,552.81 hectares, not the full area. It said the diverted land “shall be maintained as green area”, with any other use decided case by case by the ministry. It noted from satellite analysis that an aerodrome “already exists in the zone”. Most of the forest and revenue land was already in non-forest use, it found.

The company then asked the ministry to delete or amend the committee’s conditions. It wanted the green-area condition rewritten, so that the land “shall be utilized for various industrial activities”.

The November 2018 approval gave the full 1,576.81 hectares. The green-area condition was gone. In its place, vegetation could be cleared “as and when a specific project / industry is to come up in the SEZ”. The letter lists Siracha among the villages and sets no area aside there.

Seven years late

The approval had conditions, including compensatory planting on 3,154 hectares, double the forest taken. The state was to report them met before final approval.

In February 2026 the ministry wrote that the compliance report had arrived “nearly seven years after grant of approval”, beyond the approval’s five-year life. It also asked why planting land equal to the forest was offered, instead of double.

After the state replied in April, the ministry granted final approval for 235.46 hectares, and then for another 247.43.

The ministry’s February 2026 letter on Mundra: the compliance report came “nearly seven years after grant of approval”.

“Such pristine area”

The same pattern runs through the coal belt of central India. In February 2024 the ministry wrote to Madhya Pradesh about the Dhirauli coal mine in Singrauli. Its own mapping found 1,601 hectares of forest in the lease, not the 1,397.54 proposed. The state had told it the site lay within a kilometre of an elephant corridor.

It estimated that 570,666 trees would be affected. Most of the land was very dense forest, and the ministry asked the state to justify proposing “such pristine area”.

In-principle approval followed on 24 September 2024. Final approval came on 9 May 2025, four days after the state’s compliance letter. In August 2025 the approval passed to Mahan Energen, whose letterhead gives Adani Corporate House, Ahmedabad.

The ministry’s February 2024 letter on Dhirauli: 1,601 hectares of mapped forest, an elephant corridor, 570,666 trees and “such pristine area”.

In Hasdeo, Chhattisgarh, the ministry’s experts had said no outright. In June 2011 the Forest Advisory Committee recorded sloth bear, leopard and elephants at the Parsa East and Kete Basan block, and forest rights unsettled. It did “not recommend the diversion”.

On 23 June 2011 the minister overruled it, saying he had to keep the “development picture in mind”. Final approval for 1,898.328 hectares came in March 2012. The mine is run by a company 74% owned by Adani Enterprises.

The ministry’s own file note: the Forest Advisory Committee “does not recommend the diversion”, and the minister “has not accepted” that advice.

Next door, Parsa received final approval for 841.538 hectares on 21 October 2021. Two days later the Governor of Chhattisgarh ordered an inquiry into allegedly fake village assembly resolutions for it, petitioners told the Supreme Court.

In Ghatbarra, a village on the edge of the first mine, community forest rights were cancelled in 2016. The reason, the villagers’ petition says, was that they “are interrupting in mining work”.

The approvals have not slowed. Kente Extension, in Surguja, won in-principle approval for 1,742.6 hectares of forest on 9 June 2026. On 23 July 2026 Purunga, an underground coal mine in Raigarh, won it for 621.331 hectares of forest, though surface rights cover only 9.982 hectares. The applicant is Ambuja Cements, whose filings give Adani Corporate House as its registered office.

On the coast, the record shows a safeguard can work. At Hazira, near Surat, mangroves found in the land Adani’s port company sought were left out before the 2022 approvals. From Khavda in Kutch, two Adani transmission lines got 493 hectares of forest land. For the newer line, 261 of its 267 hectares lie in the Banni Grassland forest division.

The ground gets hotter

Forests cool the land around them. Trees pull water from the soil and evaporate it, which carries heat away from the ground.

A 2019 study measured this from satellites across the globe. In the tropics, 5 km squares that lost about half their forest warmed at the surface by 1.08°C on average. That is the heat of ground and canopy as a satellite sees it, an average, not a measurement at any one mine.

Forests also make rain. A 2023 study in Nature looked across the tropics. Over areas of 200 km, each percentage point of forest lost cut rainfall by 0.25 mm a month. India is already hotter: 2024 was its warmest year since national records began in 1901.

There is an innocent reading. Ports, power and coal are lawful projects, and the approvals order compensatory planting, as Mundra’s did. Much of the Mundra forest was invasive weed. In 2023 the Adani Group pledged to grow 100 million trees by 2030.

But the objections in these files came from the government’s own officers and experts, and each time the approval went ahead.

In the ministry’s posted documents, 1,093.92 hectares of the 2018 Mundra approval are still waiting for their final letter.

The documents this story is based on, the clearances, orders, agendas and filings, are collected in one place.

→ The documents behind this story — add your DocumentCloud link

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Key findings

• Five Adani companies paid Rs 1,50,80,000 to settle SEBI charges that grew out of the Hindenburg report.

• They settled “without admitting or denying” the facts, so nobody ruled on whether the charges were true.

• The same officer settled a case against Adani Ports chief executive Karan Adani twelve days earlier.

• Both files cleared SEBI’s committees on the same two days, 29 June and 13 August 2026.

At 3.58 pm on 22 September 2026, Jai Sebastian, an adjudicating officer at the Securities and Exchange Board of India, digitally signed a five-page order. It closed a case against five Adani companies.

Adani Enterprises paid Rs 76,05,000 and Adani Green Energy Rs 45,50,000. Adani Total Gas, AWL Agri Business and Adani Energy Solutions paid Rs 9,75,000 each. The bill came to Rs 1,50,80,000.

What each company paid. Source: SEBI settlement order, 22 September 2026, page 4.

The charges came out of a report the group had called false. When the US short seller Hindenburg Research published it on 24 January 2023, the Adani Group answered with 413 pages. The report, it said, was “nothing but a lie” and “a calculated attack on India, the independence, integrity and quality of Indian institutions”.

The group’s reply to Hindenburg, January 2023. Source: Adani Response filed with the National Stock Exchange, printed page 3.

But when SEBI put those allegations to the companies, they did not fight them. They paid to close the case “without admitting or denying the findings of facts and conclusions of law”.

This was no ordinary defendant. A 2023 OCCRP investigation described “the group’s widely perceived closeness to Prime Minister Narendra Modi”. By late May 2026 the group had added around Rs 5 lakh crore in market value that year, IANS reported. At that pace, the settlement cost it about 38 seconds of the year’s gains.

What SEBI said was wrong

The charges went to whether investors could trust the group’s books. SEBI alleged that Adani Enterprises kept out of its 2012-13 annual report the deals between its subsidiary Adani Estates and Vakoder Investment. Vakoder was a related party, a company tied to the people who control the group.

The second charge was about the auditors. Between 2015 and 2021, group companies filed reports signed by audit firms that held no valid peer-review certificate. That certificate shows the accountants’ own institute has checked an auditor’s work. SEBI’s rules require it.

The charges, and the choice to settle without admitting or denying them. Source: SEBI settlement order, 22 September 2026, page 3.

SEBI had examined Hindenburg’s allegations at seven Adani companies. On 15 February 2024 it sent five of them a show-cause notice. They applied to settle that year. Talks with SEBI’s internal committee ran through August and October 2024 and resumed in May 2026. On 29 May the companies offered revised terms.

Then the file moved. SEBI’s high-powered advisory committee recommended the amounts on 29 June. A panel of whole-time members accepted them on 13 August. On 5 September the companies emailed to say they had paid.

The same officer, the same dates

Those three dates appear in a second Adani file. On 10 September Sebastian settled a case against Karan Adani, Gautam Adani’s son and chief executive of Adani Ports, and B Ravi, its finance chief.

SEBI had alleged that the two men broke the rule on the compliance certificate a chief executive and finance chief give their board. The case concerned bank transactions and deposits between Adani Ports and a company called PMC Projects, under a notice of 22 November 2023. That order does not mention Hindenburg.

Each man paid Rs 13,65,000. Their file reached the advisory committee on 29 June and the panel on 13 August, and their payment was reported by email on 5 September. One officer signed both orders.

Jai Sebastian’s signature on both orders, twelve days apart. Source: SEBI settlement orders of 10 September 2026 (page 4) and 22 September 2026 (page 5).

Six days after the five companies settled, SEBI closed a third Adani case, on public shareholding, the same way.

“Truth has prevailed”

The group has welcomed SEBI’s word when it went its way. In September 2025 SEBI whole-time member Kamlesh Chandra Varshney ruled on Hindenburg’s claim that money was routed through two firms, Milestone Tradelinks and Rehvar Infrastructure. He found the allegations “not established”.

Gautam Adani wrote to shareholders six days later. The Hindenburg report, he said, “was a direct challenge to the audacity of Indian enterprises to dream on a global scale”. “With SEBI’s clear and final word, truth has prevailed.”

Gautam Adani’s letter to shareholders. Source: Adani Enterprises filing, 24 September 2025, page 2.

Varshney’s order weighed the facts and applied the law. Sebastian had been appointed “to inquire into and adjudge” the 2024 charges. His order did neither.

Settling is lawful, and SEBI does it often. In 2025-26 it disposed of 170 settlement applications and collected Rs 109.82 crore. It also turned 199 away that year, rejected, returned or withdrawn. Its rules let it refuse to settle a default that “affected the integrity of the market”.

The group itself had cast the allegations as an attack on the “integrity and quality of Indian institutions”. SEBI settled anyway.

What the order leaves out

The order names the two audit firms, Dharmesh Parikh & Co LLP and Shah Dhandharia & Co LLP. It does not say whether SEBI has acted against either. Nor does it say what the Vakoder deals were worth, or whether the 2012-13 accounts were ever corrected. It does not explain how group companies kept filing reports from uncertified auditors from 2015 to 2021. SEBI can still restore the case if anything the companies told it proves untrue.

Everyone who settles signs an undertaking in a form the rules prescribe. It waives any appeal. It bars the signer from publicly denying SEBI’s findings once the order is passed. And for disclosure defaults it carries the line “I/we do not deny the alleged default.”

The companies that called the charges “nothing but a lie” would have signed that form. SEBI has not published what they signed.

The documents this story is based on, the clearances, orders, agendas and filings, are collected in one place.

→ The documents behind this story — add your DocumentCloud link

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Key findings

• On 18 May 2026, Uzbekistan’s energy minister met Adani’s international energy chief, Amit Singh, in Tashkent.

• The joint statement Modi signed on 30 August repeats that meeting’s readout in the same order, with two changes.

• Adani met Uzbek ministers or state companies six times before Modi arrived, the last on minerals twelve days before a geology pact.

• No visit document names Adani, and no signed Adani deal in Uzbekistan is on the public record.

Two sentences, three months apart

On 30 August 2026, Narendra Modi and Shavkat Mirziyoyev closed a two-day state visit in Tashkent. They signed eleven documents and issued a joint statement.

Under the heading on energy, the two leaders gave one sentence:

“The Leaders welcomed the discussions on advancing cooperation in the fields of renewable energy, modernization of energy infrastructure, and the implementation of prospective investment projects.”

The joint statement’s energy and minerals passages. Source: Ministry of External Affairs, Joint Statement, 30 August 2026.

It welcomes “the discussions” without saying whose. But the same words had been printed three months earlier, about a meeting with the Adani Group.

On 18 May, in Tashkent, energy minister Jurabek Mirzamakhmudov met Amit Singh, who runs international energy for Adani. The next day the state newspaper Yangi O’zbekiston published the official account in English:

“During the talks, the parties discussed the development of renewable energy sources, modernization of energy infrastructure, increasing the efficiency of the industry, as well as the implementation of promising investment projects.”

Renewable energy, then modernization of energy infrastructure, then the implementation of investment projects. The order and the nouns are the same. In three months only two things changed: “the efficiency of the industry” dropped out, and “promising” became “prospective”.

The national news agency’s report of the 18 May meeting, citing the energy ministry, with the minister’s and Singh’s names marked. Source: UzA, 19 May 2026.

A summer of meetings

The energy minister was only the first. The next day, 19 May, investment minister Laziz Kudratov met Singh. The government portal says Adani was “presented with promising project proposals” in hydropower, mining, infrastructure and real estate. Both sides agreed “to jointly advance prospective projects and establish mechanisms for further collaboration”.

Two days later the private outlet UzDaily reported that Deputy Prime Minister Jamshid Khodjaev had met Singh. They went over energy, chemicals, mining and critical minerals, it said, citing Khodjaev.

In June the state hydropower company, Uzbekhydroenergo, took its turn at the Tashkent International Investment Forum. It reported that “an agreement was reached” with Adani “to establish a joint working group and to implement promising projects”.

At the June forum, China Huaneng signed a memorandum; Adani got a working group. Source: UzA, 21 June 2026.

On 10 August the talks moved to Adani’s home city. A delegation led by Kudratov met the Adani Group in Ahmedabad. The national news agency UzA quoted Gautam Adani saying the group was “highly interested” in building hydropower and pumped-storage plants in Uzbekistan.

The metals company

Eight days later came the state metals company. The Uzbekistan Technological Metals Complex, known as TMK, was set up by presidential decree to process metals such as lithium, graphite and tungsten. It belongs to a national plan of 120 critical minerals projects worth $4.2 billion, on which the president was briefed in June.

On 18 August TMK met the Adani Group. Its statement, quoted by the Azerbaijani agency Trend, said the two sides discussed TMK’s mining projects, “studying the available geological and technical data” and more exploration. TMK also laid out “a pipeline of potential investment projects”.

Trend’s report of TMK’s statement on the Adani meeting. Source: Trend News Agency, 18 August 2026.

Modi landed eleven days later. Among the eleven documents signed on 30 August was a memorandum on geology and mineral resources between India’s Ministry of Mines and Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Mining Industry and Geology.

The joint statement then went over the ground TMK had covered. The leaders “expressed interest in encouraging Indian companies to participate in the development of prospective mineral deposits in Uzbekistan”. They agreed on joint projects in “geological exploration, mining, mineral processing, and the development of integrated value chains”.

Another of the eleven documents paired the Indian state of Gujarat with the Samarkand region. Ahmedabad, where Kudratov’s delegation met Adani, is in Gujarat.

India’s list of outcomes from the visit, items 5 and 11 marked. Source: Ministry of External Affairs, 30 August 2026.

What the record leaves out

Adani’s name appears in none of it. None of the eleven documents on India’s list mentions the group, and the joint statement speaks of Indian companies in the plural.

Uzbekistan courts many investors at once. At the June forum Uzbekhydroenergo met nine parties, among them China Huaneng, MUFG and the World Bank. China Huaneng signed a memorandum there, while Adani got a working group. In the same round Khodjaev also saw AD Ports Group and a German cable maker.

Nor is there a deal. A search of Uzbek and Indian official sources found talks, project proposals, a working group and stated interest. It found no signed Adani contract, licence or joint venture in Uzbekistan.

What the record does hold is the order of events and the wording. A group widely seen as close to the Prime Minister sat with Uzbekistan’s energy, investment and metals officials through the summer. Then the two leaders signed off on cooperation in the same fields, in nearly the same words.

After Ahmedabad, UzA reported, both sides agreed to keep going “by establishing strong project partnership mechanisms”. The leaders set up a mechanism of their own, led by their foreign ministers, to oversee “priority bilateral initiatives and projects”.

As of 23 October 2026, the text of the geology memorandum has not been published. Neither government has said whether any other Indian company was shown TMK’s geological data.

The documents this story is based on, the clearances, orders, agendas and filings, are collected in one place.

→ The documents behind this story — add your DocumentCloud link

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Key findings

• Two Adani data centre parks for Google’s AI hub were cleared nine days after the companies applied.

• The forest officer’s no-objection for the Tarluvada site is dated 8 April, the day before the application.

• The state’s expert committee recorded about 90% of that site as reserve forest, and recommended clearance at the same meeting.

• Both parks were filed as buildings, each just under the size ceiling of a class that needs no impact report and no public hearing.

On 18 April 2026, S Sri Saravanan put his digital signature on two environmental clearances. He is member secretary of Andhra Pradesh’s State Environment Impact Assessment Authority. The clearances went to two Adani companies building the data centres of Google’s AI hub outside Visakhapatnam, each park described as 1,000 MW. The companies had applied nine days earlier, on 9 April.

But one paper in the Tarluvada file is older than the application. The minutes of the state’s expert committee, copied into the clearance, record a forest no-objection certificate from the Divisional Forest Officer, Visakhapatnam, for 266.60 acres of the site. It is dated 8 April.

Just above it, the same minutes record what the committee saw when it checked PARIVESH, the Union environment ministry’s clearance portal. “Approximately 90% of the proposed site falls within the Pedda Chukka Konda Reserve Forest,” they say. The next sentence says the Survey of India map shows no forest on the land. The minutes never say which record the committee believed. It recommended clearance at that meeting, one day after the applications came in.

Page 4 of the Tarluvada clearance: the committee’s reserve forest finding, and the forest officer’s certificate dated 8 April 2026.

The applicants were not ordinary. Adani Enterprises and Google announced the hub in October 2025, about $15 billion, to be built with AdaniConneX, Adani’s data centre venture. The group’s chairman, Gautam Adani, was an early supporter of Narendra Modi’s political aspirations, CNBC reported. Chandrababu Naidu’s government in Andhra Pradesh is allied with Modi’s party.

The state is paying for the hub too. Its package for Google, tax breaks and cheap land, power and water, is estimated at Rs 22,000 crore over 20 years, the Guardian reported. At Tarluvada, 520 families have lost plots the government allotted them about 20 years ago. By September bulldozers had stripped the hillside near the village of its trees, and the paper put the forest to be cleared for the project at more than 100 acres.

Nine days

The land moved first. APIIC, the state’s industrial corporation, provisionally allotted 266.60 acres at Tarluvada to the Adani subsidiary on 20 February, and the full price had been paid by 27 February. The forest officer’s certificate followed on 8 April.

On 9 April both companies applied online. The same day, the committee drew up an “additional agenda” that put both projects before it the next morning. On 10 April Pridhvi Envirotech, a Hyderabad consultant, presented both, and the committee recommended both.

On 15 April the authority accepted the recommendations, and on 18 April Saravanan signed. Ten days later Google broke ground, and Naidu laid the foundation stone with Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.

The committee’s additional agenda, created on 9 April 2026, the day the companies applied, for a meeting on 10 April.

The rules give the committee up to 60 days to appraise a project like this, and the authority up to 45 more to decide. Andhra Pradesh used one day and five.

Other files waited their turn. Of the 26 items on the authority’s 15 April agenda, 23 had been filed in earlier months, one of them in 2022. Only three dated from April 2026: the two Adani parks and a solar factory. The hub’s third site, at Adavivaram, applied on 24 April and was cleared on 10 June, after 47 days.

S Sri Saravanan’s digital signature on the Tarluvada clearance, dated 18 April 2026 (page 17).

Filed as buildings

Both parks went in as “building and construction” projects, a class for built-up areas between 20,000 and 150,000 square metres. Tarluvada declared 148,922 square metres and Rambilli 148,476, each within about 1,500 square metres of the ceiling. Projects in this class need no environmental impact report and no public hearing.

Data centres have no category of their own, and the state later told the High Court that was why it used this one, LawChakra reported. So two parks drawing 1,626 MW from the state grid between them were appraised as buildings. Tarluvada lists 200 diesel generators as backup, Rambilli another 150.

The committee wrote down the limits of its own review. It “appraised the application from the Environmental point of view only with respect to liquid, solid and air pollution management.”

The water budget was drawn to the same scale. Tarluvada declared 267 kilolitres a day, and the consultant’s slides show it was built from drinking and flushing water for 785 staff, guards and visitors, plus equipment cleaning and gardens. Google says the hub will be cooled by air. Permission to draw groundwater was left for later, to be “obtained” before construction or operation.

What the committee wrote about the forest

The consultant’s slides describe the Tarluvada land as “undulated terrain with trees, herbs, shrubs, and grass”, with a hill, Chukka Konda, on its western side. A photograph in the same deck, stamped 27 February, shows scrub and trees below the hills.

The consultant’s photograph of the Tarluvada site, stamped 27 February 2026, from its presentation to the state committee.

The slides name three forests near the site: Kambalakonda reserve forest, 1.7 km to the south, and two farther off. Pedda Chukka Konda is not among them. The reserve forest entered the record when the committee checked the federal portal at its 10 April meeting.

The minutes also place Kambalakonda Wildlife Sanctuary about 1.53 km from the first phase. The clearance answers the forest and the sanctuary with general instructions: obey the forest and wildlife laws, and “scrupulously comply” with the conditions of the forest officer’s certificate.

The Adani group says all legal approvals were given. Google told the Guardian it had “engaged deeply” with local communities and that the project would have “no expected impact” on them. Neither statement addresses the reserve forest the committee recorded at Tarluvada.

Before the tribunal

The order names two ways it can be undone. An appeal lies with the National Green Tribunal, within 30 days. The authority itself may cancel the clearance at any time if it was obtained “through suppression of any information or furnishing false information”.

Human Rights Forum has gone to the tribunal, calling the state’s risk assessment “grossly inadequate, scientifically unrealistic, and misleading”, the Guardian reported. The Andhra Pradesh High Court has declined to stay construction, LawChakra reported.

A separate appeal against the Adavivaram clearance says that site lies about 750 metres from the Kambalakonda sanctuary. The tribunal has asked the Union government to respond, and listed the appeal for hearing on 26 October 2026.

On the forest, the Tarluvada clearance leans on the officer’s certificate of 8 April. It does not reproduce the certificate or list its conditions, only its acreage and its date, the day before the companies applied.

The documents this story is based on, the clearances, orders, agendas and filings, are collected in one place.

→ The documents behind this story — add your DocumentCloud link

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Key findings

• The Supreme Court ordered customs to refund the tax Adani Power paid on Mundra electricity from September 2010 to February 2016.

• Its reason: a rule already makes Adani pay the duty on its coal, so taxing the power too “is to double count”.

• A government order had switched that rule off from 6 September 2010. The judgment never mentions it.

• A Rs 963.94 crore coal duty demand for 2009-10 to 2014-15 is still open, with nothing paid under protest.

“Is to double count”

On 5 January 2026, Justices Aravind Kumar and N.V. Anjaria of the Supreme Court signed a 33-page judgment in favour of Adani Power. Customs was to hand back the tax the company had paid on electricity sent from its Mundra plant into the rest of India. The refund covers 16 September 2010 to 15 February 2016, and was due within eight weeks.

The government had defended that tax as a way to recover the benefit of duty-free inputs “such as imported coal”. The judges disagreed. A rule of the special economic zone, they wrote, “already obliges” the plant to pay back the duty on its inputs when its power leaves the zone. To tax the electricity on top “is to double count”.

Supreme Court judgment of 5 January 2026, para 64: the rule “already obliges” Adani Power, so taxing the power “is to double count”.

But for the years the court was refunding, that rule had been switched off. On 28 October 2010 the Department of Commerce issued an order one sentence long. It reads: “Operation of Rule 47(3) of SEZ Rules, 2006 is kept abeyance w.e.f. 6.9.2010 till further orders.” Rule 47(3) is the rule the judges relied on. It stopped running on 6 September 2010, ten days before the refund period begins.

The one-sentence order that suspended the coal duty rule from 6 September 2010. Department of Commerce, 28 October 2010.

The judgment reproduces Rule 47(3) in full, with no word that it had been suspended. The words “instruction” and “abeyance” appear nowhere in its 33 pages, and neither does the Commerce Department.

So the court refunded one tax on the strength of another that the government had stopped collecting. Adani Power belongs to the Adani Group, which OCCRP reported in 2023 is widely perceived as close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Its counsel in the Supreme Court was P Chidambaram, the former finance minister.

How much was paid back is not stated in the judgment or in Adani Power’s latest annual report. In 2014-15 alone, the company booked Rs 86.94 crore of customs duty on its electricity.

Two taxes, one switched off

The Mundra plant sits inside a special economic zone on the Gujarat coast, so its imported coal arrives free of customs duty. Power used inside the zone keeps that benefit. For power sold to the rest of India, the rules required the plant to pay the duty “on consumables and raw materials used for generation of power”. For a coal plant, that is the duty on its coal.

In February 2010 the government added a second charge: 16% on the power itself, backdated to June 2009. Adani Power went to the Gujarat High Court and called it double taxation.

Then the government changed course. From 16 September 2010 the 16% gave way to ten paise a unit, later cut to three paise. Ten days before that, the coal duty rule had been switched off. A second order in February 2011 narrowed the suspension, but the clause on duty for power sold into India stayed off.

For five and a half years the coal duty was off and a small power tax was on. In February 2016 the power tax went to nil for plants like Adani’s.

The order that dropped out

In July 2015 Adani Power won its first case. The High Court struck down the 16%, but only for June 2009 to September 2010, when both taxes had run together.

The company then went after the small power tax as well, every paisa from September 2010 to February 2016. On 28 June 2019 the High Court refused. The government’s lawyer had put the 2010 order before the judges. With the coal duty off since 2010, he argued, a refund would hand Adani a “double benefit”. Counsel for another respondent said the rule had “been kept in abeyance for a period of five years”.

In the Supreme Court the order fell out of view. The judgment’s account of the government’s arguments does not mention it. Its summary of the 2019 ruling leaves out the double benefit.

Chidambaram told the judges there had been “no change in the law or in the underlying facts” between September 2010 and February 2016. The court agreed, finding “no change either in the law or in the relevant facts”.

That finding carried weight. The court held that the 2015 ruling covered the later years only in the “absence” of a change in the legal setting. The 2010 order was such a change, and it suspended the very rule the double count rests on.

Liable, paid, not required

Did Adani Power pay the coal duty? Its answer has moved with the case.

In 2010, fighting the 16%, it told the High Court it would “continue to be liable” for duty on its coal. By 2015 the same court recorded its case as having “already paid duty on raw materials, namely, coal”. The government’s lawyer described a letter the company sent in September 2015. In it, Adani Power put the duty benefit it had taken at Rs 963.94 crore and the duty it had paid at Rs 458.50 crore.

In June 2017 the group gave another answer. Asked by the Economic and Political Weekly about its tax benefits, the Adani Group’s chief legal officer wrote: “we are not required to pay any duty/levy on the goods imported/procured in SEZ”.

The Adani Group’s chief legal officer to the Economic and Political Weekly, June 2017, as republished by The Wire.

The bill still open

Since 2017-18, Adani Power’s annual reports have disclosed a demand from the Development Commissioner of the Mundra zone. It is for duty on raw materials used for power sold outside the zone, covering 2009-10 to 2014-15. The amount is Rs 963.94 crore, and the company is contesting it. That is the same figure as the duty benefit in its 2015 letter. The 2018-19 report called it “custom duty on coal”.

So the government suspended the coal duty from September 2010, then demanded it for years that include the suspension. The Supreme Court refunded the power tax as though the duty had applied throughout.

The company has also said who would carry the cost if it lost. Its reports describe such duties as “eligible to be made good” under its power purchase agreements with distribution companies. Every report from 2017-18 to 2025-26 repeats the line. Since 2022-23 the reports add that the company has “not considered this as contingent liabilities”, meaning it does not list the demand even as a possible bill.

Adani Power annual report 2025-26, note 45: the Rs 963.94 crore coal duty demand, and the view that it can be made good under power contracts.

On 31 March 2026, three months after the Supreme Court ordered the power tax refunded, the auditor’s list of disputed dues still showed the Rs 963.94 crore coal duty pending before the Development Commissioner. Nothing had been paid against it under protest.

The documents this story is based on, the clearances, orders, agendas and filings, are collected in one place.

→ The documents behind this story — add your DocumentCloud link

Subscribe to UndercurrentS

Message us securely on Signal

Share on WhatsApp