Adani's Millions in Mauritius

The ED and CBI were investigating AgustaWestland kickbacks. They found Adani’s network.

- NILEENA MS

SOMETIME IN THE MIDDLE OF 2018, a team from the Central Bureau of Investigation touched down at the airport near Port Louis, the picturesque capital of the Indian Ocean tax haven of Mauritius. It had a straightforward task at hand. Over the past four years, the CBI had been investigating one of India’s most carefully-documented defence corruption cases. Italian and Indian investigations had found that executives of the European companies AgustaWestland and Finmeccanica paid kickbacks to intermediaries and to senior members of the Indian government and armed forces, to manipulate technical evaluations and secure contracts for India’s purchase of 12 helicopters, worth ₹3,727 crore. The routing of the money had already been traced to a Mauritian company called Interstellar Technologies.

The CBI team first visited the Mauritian attorney general’s office, collecting the bank and company documents of Interstellar and a few related firms. The former office of Interstellar was not far from there—less than a ten-minute walk, past the construction site of the modernist Supreme Court building that the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, would inaugurate two years later. A stroll across that, across a few bed-and-breakfasts and a lonely Chinese eatery, lay a cute white wooden house with a black-tiled roof, its walls decked in several varieties of bougainvillea: 44, Rue St Georges.