By Shivaji Sarkar
As the Gautam Adani episode unfolds, it underscores the urgency of balancing corporate ambitions with public accountability. Failure to act, risks further eroding India’s global economic standing and investor confidence.There is an imminent need to ensure ethical corporate governance with due transparency and aligning with practices with global standards to restore trust. Also,Members of Parliament must prioritise corporate accountability to ensure economic growth.
Corporate bodies such as FICCI, Assocham and PHD Chamber of Commerce must ensure legislative reforms for revival of Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices (MRTP) type laws to reintroduce safeguards against monopolistic practices, as also ensure that Satyam like falsified accounts are not repeated.
Gautam Adani is no ordinary Indian billionaire. Over the past 10 years, in effect he has become an extension of India’s government. His conglomerate, Adani Group, builds and buys ports, factories and power plants, often under state contract or license.Adani’s business empire has become central to India since 2014 during the rise of Narendra Modi, first elected as prime minister. In ten years, the international press estimates the group is worth ten times what it was at the start of the Covid 19 pandemic.
This November 21, the US government charged Adani with “multiple counts of fraud”. The US Federal prosecutors accused him and his associates of offering $265 million to Indian officials and lying about the bribery scheme to the Wall Street investors when raising money for a massive renewable energy project, a criminal offence as per the US law.
These incidents have broader implications for India’s trade and investment relations, particularly in emerging markets such as Africa and Southeast Asia. Indian companies may face increased scrutiny, stricter compliance requirements, and reduced trust from international partners. This erosion of confidence could lead to a decline in foreign direct investment (FDI), a key driver of India’s economic growth.
Perhaps the Adani group had not committed any offence under the Indian law. It repeatedly stood up against Hindenburg allegations of short-selling, manipulations in the stock market and sustained through submission of affidavits with the courts of law, Security Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and other agencies.The SEBI chief Madhavi Buch with her husband’s controversial investments in the group entities also gave queer rulings. In 2023, Parliament sessions were washed away for these reasons.
The nation has lost substantially with a thawed stock market since January end. The combined market capitalisation of all 11 Adani Group companies fell by Rs 38,000 crore to Rs 11.68 lakh crore following the latest US indictment news. The rating agency S&P Global on Friday, November 22 revised its outlook on the three group entities to ‘negative’.But that was not the end. Kenya surviving a political turmoil, scrapped $2.6 billion deals with the company. It found the terms too unrealistic, a recall of the Bangladesh situation. Even investments in Sri Lanka are being questioned.
The BSE investors lost over Rs 13 lakh crore in the second week of November alone. It would not be easy to calculate the losses due the bloodbath since January. The haircut is too heavy.It impacts credibility of the Indian corporates. It’s not a legalese. It hurts most companies. Their capability of raising funds internationally is severely compromised. It’s almost a repeat of the Satyam accounting misadventure with the involvement of an international auditing firm. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) affiliates were the auditors of Satyam Computer Services (Satyam) when the company’s accounting fraud was discovered in 2009.
India’s Adani moment was destined around 2000, when one day suddenly Pramod Mahajan, then Parliamentary Affairs Minister, with keen interest in corporate affairs told a select group of journalists, “the MRTPC (Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission), is hindrance in corporate growth. We would do away with it.”It was a notable moment.
The country’s first Prime Minister, Pt Jawaharlal Nehru had never allowed ingress of the Bombay Club, a nomenclature of the Indian corporate given to itself. Despite this club, the Nehru government was able to stand for an anti-monopolistic legal structure as it was concerned about corporate misgovernance and made ways to impose conditions to keep them in check. Under his daughter, Indira Gandhi as prime minister,the government enacted MRTP Act in 1969 and the regulator MRTPC to prevent bypassing the law to prevent the concentration of economic power and check monopolies.
By 1991, the PV Narasimha Rao government diluted it to suit the corporate demand followed by the Harshad Mehta stock scam in March 1992, post Union Budget.In 2002, the Atal Behari Vajpayee government enacted the Competition Act to replace the MRTP Act. The rest was done by the UPA-I government of Manmohan Singh on 1 September 2009 to formally scrap the MRTP Act that the Indian corporate believed “saved” them from predatory moves as also checks and balances for the corporate to behave ethically, a provision that the Bombay Club detested.
In fact, it was not the Atal Behari Vajpayee government that made the move to delete it from the statute book. The PV Narsimha Rao government with its finance minister Manmohan Singh amended the MRTP Act in 1991itself after the introduction of the “New Economic” liberalisation policy. The amendments removed pre-entry restrictions on mergers and acquisitions. The rest was done by the UPA-I government.
The 2023-2024 Adani moments could be compared only with the Rs 7800 crore Satyam scam, a corporate fraud that took place in 2009, and was considered India’s largest business scandal at the time. The scam involved Ramalinga Raju, the founder and chairman of Satyam Computer Services. An anonymous whistleblower sent emails to a company director, Krishna Palepu, using alias Joseph Abraham. The whistleblower also alerted the SEBI and the media about the scam.
The years 2012 to 2014 were marked by many corporate frauds. Parliamentarians, who once were too vocal about such issues, surprisingly are silent now. Only one MP has raised the issue of gifts to Parliamentary Standing Committee of railway members. It involves a gold coin from the Rail India Technical and Economic Service (RITES).
Members of Parliament irrespective of party affiliation should take up such blatant corporate defiance, not to tame them, but to ensure the corporate entity remains safe and adds to the growth and benevolence. The return of the MRTP-type law must be a sine qua non.The country has done a great disservice since 1991, of undoing the moment that “legalised” the doors to what the corporate is brazenly bulldozing now. Would Parliament stand up to save the country or kow-tow the biz that has taken the credibility to its nadir?—INFA
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