Gautam Adani he’s back in the storm. The king of Indian oil also became a pioneer of renewables would have sold poor quality coal passing it off as high quality, “cleaner” fuel and much more expensive, to a public electricity company. This was revealed by an investigation by Financial Timesbased on documents obtained from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a consortium of independent media and journalists who investigate corruption and organized crime cases.
The tycoon had already been mentioned two weeks ago, in the middle of the electoral marathon, by the prime minister Narendra Modibrought up to hit his biggest challengerthe Congress party: Adani, together with the Subcontinent’s other richest man, Mukesh Ambani, was sending, Modi had insinuated at a rally, «trucks of money» to the Indian National Congress of Rahul Gandhi, to buy his silence. Surprising words, those of the Prime Minister, towards an entrepreneur who has always been considered very close to him, whose rise would have been favored by the government’s “friendly” policies of New Delhi.
An ascent that had brought him for a period of 2022 to become the richest man in the world. Then the falla year ago, when the value of his empire collapsed by more than 150 billion dollars after accusations of “manipulation” of shares and “accounting fraud lasting several decades”, presented by an American investment company. The Adani group then got back on its feetrecovering most of the losses and investing large sums in energy transition projects: in the middle of the desert, on the border with Pakistan, Adani is building the world’s largest renewable energy parkalmost as large as New York.
Now, however, fresh evidence arrives also compromising this new image of champion of the environment. The documents obtained by OCCRP journalists and shared with the Financial Times shed “new light on allegations of a long-standing coal scam”: they reveal that at least 24 shipments landed on the Tamil Nadu coast in 2014, with coal rated low quality, were then sold by the Adani group as the most valuable category fuel to the state electricity company, in order to triple its cost and increase revenues. The tycoon may have thus obtained, fraudulently, staggering profits at the expense of air quality: using low quality coal to produce energy means burning a greater quantity of fuel.
They are therefore added to the past accusations of corruption possible indictments for crimes against the environment, just as the group is carrying out mega “clean” energy projects. Beyond two million people are killed in India every year by pollution atmospheric, estimates a 2022 study published in the Lancet, while other research has found significant increases in infant mortality for hundreds of kilometers around coal-fired power plants.
