Adani’s Millions in Mauritius
The ED and CBI were investigating AgustaWestland kickbacks. They found Adani’s network.
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 Rs 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.
In my investigation into defence corruption by the same network, in 2023, I had collated only the clearly legible bank statements of the company to find that Interstellar had received at least Rs 250 crore, over fifteen years, in kickbacks from arms manufacturers. Most of this was siphoned through this house that would not look out of place in a picture postcard or tourism brochure. The Enforcement Directorate, which was investigating the case, had concluded that the company was controlled and financially managed by, and ultimately benefitted, a Delhi-based defence-middleman called Sushen Gupta.
The CBI officers should have been very familiar with 44, Rue St Georges. The address appeared all over the AgustaWestland case, with a regularity that was unmissable. Some of Sushen’s money for the deal was routed to his Indian companies through another Mauritian firm called Sabhah Investments, which shared the same address—also listed for Kreston, which functioned as the director of Interstellar between 2003 and 2008.