With the DMK government coming under a cloud following the indictment of the Adani Group in the United States, Tamil Nadu Electricity Minister V Senthil Balaji on Thursday strongly denied any direct or commercial ties between the state-owned power utility, Tamil Nadu Electricity Board (TNEB), and the conglomerate.

“Let me make it plain and clear that the TNEB board has had no direct or commercial relationship with the Adani Group in the last three years since the DMK came to power under MK Stalin. The Board had entered into an agreement with the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), an arm of the Union Energy Ministry,” he told reporters in his native town of Karur.

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This is the first reaction of the DMK government following the indictment of the Adani conglomerate in a US court. The US Justice Department had charged the Adani Group with bribing government officials between July 2021 and February 2022. Subsequently, state-owned power utilities in Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Jammu & Kashmir signed contracts for purchasing electricity from the SECI.

Denying any illegality in TNEB entering into a long-term power purchase agreement with SECI, Balaji explained, “We have signed a contract to buy 1,500 MW of electricity from SECI at ₹2.61 per unit for a period of 25 years. This is very very cheap. The previous AIADMK government had purchased solar power at an exorbitant rate of ₹7.01.”

“It was SECI that had entered into agreements with private power producers to purchase electricity from them. Our contract is only with SECI, a public sector undertaking. As such, there is no question of TNEB having any sort of commercial relationship with the Adani conglomerate,” he further clarified.