Billionaire Gautam Adani said his group is planning more than 1.1 trillion rupees (S$17 billion) of new investments in India, signalling the conglomerate’s focus on growing in its home market while fighting corruption charges in the US.
This will fund projects ranging from pumped storage to cement and mining to smart-metres and thermal energy, Adani said at an investment summit in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh on Monday (Feb 24). The group is also in discussions for a greenfield smart city, an airport project and a coal-gasification project in the state at an additional investment of one trillion rupees, he added.
The India investment plans of Adani come amid legal challenges it faces in the US, and a string of project setbacks in countries including Kenya and Sri Lanka.
Raising funds overseas has also become harder for the Indian conglomerate since the US Department of Justice’s November indictment of Adani over an alleged bribery plot to win contracts – charges that the Indian group has refuted.
To be sure, announcements made at investor summits are typically just expressions of investment intentions and not binding spending commitments. But his comments mark Adani’s renewed focus on the domestic market to drive expansion.
Adani on Monday did not outline how his group will fund the new projects in Madhya Pradesh. Last year, the conglomerate had committed 750 billion rupees in the same province to ramp up power generation capacity, cement grinding units and other industries.
Still, raising funds might prove to be a challenge. One of the group firms, Adani Green Energy, is said to be in talks with local lenders to refinance as much as US$1.1 billion of US dollar debt in rupees, Bloomberg reported earlier.
Adani said on Monday that his group has already invested more than 500 billion rupees and created over 25,000 jobs across energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, logistics, and agri-business, without elaborating. BLOOMBERG
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