A battle royale has broken out between the Ambani and Adani camps. With the indirect acquisition of VCPL's share in NDTV, Adani has declared war on Mukeshbhai. Muddyzee is now caught in the crossfire. He bent backward to please the Adanis showing them with gifts ranging from Mundhra-Pipavav to green energy, highways, airports, ports, telecom et al, while bending the rules for Jio, looking away from the Amazon deal for the Biyani empire, allowing Jio to corner the single largest holding of 5G spectrum, using MEA to get cheap Russian crude for RIL and then imposing a small tax on their exports of POL products, and much more.
Both these groups have now realized that Muddyzee's utility is probably coming to a close. Hence, the race for Empire has suddenly become super hot - loot as much as you can in exchange for campaign funding. A seldom heard of credit rating agency suddenly calls the Adanis 'overleveraged' that wipes Rs. 95K crore of investor wealth off the Adani accounts in a single day. Jio's monopoly of 5G spectrum is suddenly challenged by an Adani company formed days before the auction commenced. RIL's profitable cheap Russian crude import is countered by an abortive coal import tender for the Adanis.
However, there is a not-too-subtle difference in the funding of these two business groups. RIL is fuelled not only by external and domestic borrowings (with sustainable PE ratio) while the Adani enterprises subsist, entirely, on PSB borrowing, even for their overseas ventures (Carmichael coal mine in Queensland, Australia), so much so that a former SBI Chairman even got an extension in service after the bank sanctioned a billion dollar loan for the Australian mine and subsequently joined that group as full-time Director.
This shadow boxing between the two groups has occupied much of Muddyzee's time and effort right from 2015 when IOC was forced, against the law, to permit use of their product pipeline network for peanuts as user charges even when it was already operating at 120% of its capacity with IOC products. Today their demands on Muddyzee have become humongous, such that he has been reduced to a whistle-blowing lineman in a football match.
The Credit Sights report on Adanis is just the beginning. Watch much more dirty linen that will now be washed in public and miserably expose this regime, notably its CEO. The last has certainly bitten off more than he can chew!
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