Mumbai: The country could have witnessed a repeat of the Satyam Scam had a National Stock Exchange (NSE) official not visited the factory where Gensol Engineering was apparently building Electric Vehicles (EVs) and reported back his findings.
For the uninitiated, investors in stock markets lost nearly US$ 2 Billion in the Satyam Scam of 2009. The company had then projected itself as one of the most successful IT companies. As market regulators slept, the promoters made away with millions of dollars by fudging documents.
Gensol Engineering – a purported startup by Anmol and Puneet Singh Jaggi – had all the makings of another Satyam. Fortunately, the market regulators were no longer sleeping.
On January 28, 2025, the company announced in the exchanges that it has received 30,000 orders for its EVs that were apparently unveiled at the Bharat Mobility Global Expo 2025. Documents were sought and it came to light that this ‘pre-order for 30,000 vehicles’ was about Memorandums of Understanding signed by the company with nine entities for supply of 29,000 cars.
These MoUs were actually nothing beyond ‘expressions of willingness’. They had no details regarding pricing or delivery schedules.
Based on this revelation, the NSE official visited the company’s so-called plant at Chakan in Pune on April 9. He discovered that there was no manufacturing activity at the plant. There were only 2-3 labourers. The official called for electricity bills for the last 12 months. It was revealed that the maximum that the company had paid in a month was Rs 1,57,037.
This was for December, 2024. No EV can be manufactured by consuming that kind of electricity.
During investigations, it also came to light that Gensol obtained term loans worth Rs 977.75 crore from the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA) and the Power Finance Corporation (PFC). Of this Rs 663.89 crore was for the purchase of 6,400 EVs. However, only 4,704 EVs were actually acquired, leaving Rs 207 crore unaccounted for.
The Security and Exchanges Board of India (SEBi) has now barred Anmol and Puneet from taking up any directorial or key management positions. The market regulator has also restricted the access of the two to the securities market. The two have since resigned.
