Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexander Rogi. We're speaking

today with Annette McNally, an investigative journalist and the South Asia editor at the

Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the OCCRP. Anand described his experience of high-level

retaliation to an audience at a recent trace event in Vancouver. The group found it fascinating,

and so I invited him to tell the story here on the podcast. Anand, thank you for joining me.

Thanks a lot for inviting Alexandra. Can you describe for our listeners how this all got started?

You were based in India. You're an investigative journalist. What triggered the series of events

that we're talking about today? A couple of years back, we started investigating the Adani group.

It's pursued to be very close to the Prime Minister,

Narendra Modi.

The growth the group has seen in the last 10 years

after Modi became the Prime Minister is staggering.

There's any company which has grown that quick, that fast.

So there was a lot of interest in investigating

the Adani group from my side specifically.

And when we started looking at the group, it was impossible to decide where to start.

Because I mean, when we started listing the companies, it's like over 2,000 odd companies are listed in the group.

Seven of them are listed and others are like private entities.

So I started looking

into the government agencies which had done investigations on the group. And there was this one

specific agency called DRI. It's the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence. It's the intelligence

agency of the finance ministry of India. They look after trade-based money laundering, tax

...