Adani stuffs Mundra power plant with Rs 8,100 crore debt that won’t go down

Few places encapsulate the questions swirling around billionaire Gautam Adani like the Mundra power plant — a coal-fired colossus that for years has burned through money.

This crown jewel of his power company, which can light up millions of homes, has more liabilities than assets and has run up Rs 14,718 crore ($1.8 billion) of losses. To paper over the deficit, Adani has deployed more than Rs 8,176 crore ($1 billion) of creative debt-financing and reassured investors and lenders that profits will come soon.

But Adani Power Ltd’s auditor can’t fully make sense of the math underpinning this claim — and neither can accounting experts who spoke with Bloomberg News.