Kenya cancels Adani contracts after billionaire’s US indictment
The country’s president ordered the cancellation of deals that would have given Adani control of Kenya’s main airport and to build power lines.
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Kenyan President William Ruto on Thursday told his Parliament that he has ordered the cancellation of a procurement process that would have given the Adani Group control of the country’s primary airport, reported Reuters.
Ruto said that he has also directed the scrapping of a 30-year, $736-million public-private partnership agreement signed last month by the Kenyan energy ministry with an Adani Group company to construct power transmission lines.
This came after the indictment of billionaire industrialist Gautam Adani in the United States in a multibillion-dollar bribery and fraud scheme related to the conglomerate’s solar projects in India.
“I have directed agencies within the Ministry of Transport and within the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum to immediately cancel the ongoing procurement,” Ruto said in his State of the Nation address. He attributed his decision to the “new information provided by investigative agencies and partner nations”.
Kenya’s Energy Minister Opiyo Wandayi, however, said that there was no bribery or corruption involved in awarding the transmission lines contract to the Indian conglomerate, reported Reuters.
Gautam Adani, his nephew Sagar Adani and six others were indicted by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District in New York for allegedly agreeing to pay over $265 million, or nearly Rs 2,236 crore, in bribes to Indian government officials between...
