Fledgling firm with no revenue whose CEO was indicted

The chief executive officer (CEO) of a two-year-old zero-revenue green energy company that scored a ₹10,000 crore ($1.2 billion) investment commitment from REC Ltd is among those indicted in the $250 million Adani bribery case.

- Varun Sood

New Delhi-based Ocior Energy's co-founder and CEO Ranjit Gupta was the chief executive of Azure Power Global Ltd, the company in the thick of the bribery charges by US prosecutors, between 2019 and 2022.

Ocior's other co-founder, its chief operating officer Murali Subramanian, was first president and then COO of Azure Power when Gupta was at its helm.

Prior to joining Azure Power, Gupta and Subramanian had co-founded Actis LLP-backed renewable energy company Ostro Energy, which Renew Power acquired in 2018.

Ocior Energy signed a memorandum of understanding with REC, the Indian state-owned firm that finances and promotes power projects, in September this year to construct a plant to produce 200,000 tonnes of green ammonia, or carbon-free ammonia, in Gopalpur, a coastal town in Odisha.

Gupta and Subramanian, both graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, set up Ocior Energy in August 2022. This was after Azure Power's board asked them to resign in April, according to the US department of justice's complaint dated 20 November.

The US department of justice's complaint mentions an unnamed "co-conspirator 2" along with Gupta. It does not say why Azure's board asked Gupta and Subramanian to leave.