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Sitting at the top of a business empire that spans fossil fuels, telecoms and retail, he is India’s – in fact, Asia’s – richest person.
Like India’s ascendant Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he hails from the western state of Gujarat, and is one of the country’s most visible and powerful tycoons.
Among his international targets is Australia, where he is aiming to develop energy projects worth billions of dollars in the coming years.
His name, contrary to what most Australians with a passing interest in subcontinental business and politics might think, is not Gautam Adani, the moustachioed head of his eponymous company.
It is Mukesh Ambani.
The 66-year-old, whose Reliance Industries is India’s largest company by market capitalisation, has a personal fortune estimated by Bloomberg at $US84 billion ($132 billion).
Few businesses have been more important to the amassing of that wealth than Reliance’s oil refineries.
Those refineries are now at the centre of an international game of intrigue being played at the highest levels between the West on one side and its substantial band of critics on the other.
How it came to be, and how it evolves, could well have significant implications not only for the wealth of people such as Mr Ambani, but for Australia’s very own security ties.
Desperate seller, willing buyer
At the heart of the game is the oil trade between Russia and India, for so long a mere footnote in the trading accounts of the world’s energy users.
Whereas India historically bought negligible amounts of Russian oil, that all changed in February last year when Vladimir Putin made the fateful decision to invade neighbouring Ukraine.
It was an act of naked aggression that shocked the world.
It was also a decision that tipped the world’s energy markets on their heads and prompted Moscow’s biggest energy customer – Europe – to try to wean itself off Russian supplies by the end of that year.
Virtually overnight, India went from buying a few thousand barrels of Russian oil a day to more than a million.
In September, India bought more than 1.5 million barrels of Russian oil, or roughly 20 per cent of its exports.
Ian Hall, an international political scholar at Griffith University, said there was little doubt the burgeoning oil trade between Russia and India was one of convenience for both sides.
He said Russia was getting a willing buyer for exports that had been shut out of western markets, while India was able to hoover up big amounts of energy for its growing economy.
But Professor Hall said there were deeper things than opportunism that underpinned the relationship between the two giant countries.
He said Russia had been one of the few powers to show sympathy to India when it emerged, weak, from British colonial rule in the mid-20th century.
Russia, he said, supplied India with cheap loans, agricultural goods and, crucially, defence gear.
Shared ‘anti-Western’ history
Professor Hall said just as importantly, Russia backed Delhi at a time when the US was helping to support – and arm – India’s great rival Pakistan “as a bulwark against Communism in South Asia”.
“Of course by the time you get to the 1990s and the Soviet Union has disappeared and so on, then what’s left is a sense of … historical legacy of friendship and mutual understanding,” Professor Hall said.
“In practical terms, the economic stuff all falls away.
“There’s a famous quip about Russia being a gas station with nukes … and that was kind of true in the 2000s.
“But there’s still this historical sense that the Soviets stood up for India when India was down and then also there’s the embedded issue of the defence relationship.”
Priya Chacko, a senior lecturer of international politics at the University of Adelaide, said the two sides also shared a sense of “anti-Western imperialism” that continues to this day.
Dr Chacko said more recently, there had been a growing alignment in the views and philosophies of the two countries’ leaders – Mr Putin and Mr Modi.
“Under Putin and Modi it’s taken a particularly nativist, authoritarian turn because they’re both authoritarian, they’re both nativist,” Dr Chacko said.
“Today there’s also a desire on both their parts to be better recognised in the international system.
“They both see the international system as hierarchical and excluding them from positions of power and leadership.
“So, there’s that sort of mutual sympathy as well.”
Perhaps because of this alignment, both Professor Hall and Dr Chacko said India had been loath to fall in line with Western demands for a boycott of Russia oil supplies in the wake of the Ukraine war.
And Dr Chacko said India was not interested in being dictated to by the West, nor accepting the “United States as the hegemon that it has to follow”.
India ‘acting in own interest’
Fundamentally, though, Dr Chacko said India was a vast country of 1.4 billion people and securing enough energy to power its economy would always be Delhi’s priority.
“There are still large parts of the country that lack proper electricity,” she said.
“And India is really heavily dependent on importing energy, which is why it bought up all this cheap oil from Russia.
“That’s one of the explanations for it.
“The government pinned its whole campaign on the idea India is going to be a developed country by 2046 or something and it’s meeting the needs of aspirational voters.
“So there’s a pressing electoral dimension here as well.”
As well as domestic political upsides, observers say India’s decision to welcome Russian oil exports also has an economic imperative.
Mukesh Sahdev is a senior vice president at global energy consultancy Rystad and a former long-time employee with the state-owned Indian Oil Corporation.
He said a total boycott of Russian oil exports would have been a catastrophe for the global economy given Russia was the world’s third-biggest producer, accounting for 12 per cent of output.
“My view from the beginning was … if Russia as a big producer of oil is not allowed to sell to Europe or to the US, this oil has to find its way somewhere,” Mr Sahdev said.
“If you do not allow this oil to find its way somewhere else, then the sanctions mean oil prices touching $US200 a barrel and we have a recession next Monday.”
To that end, Mr Sahdev said Western powers led by the US had been tacit in their approval of India’s decision to ignore the boycott calls.
In any case, he said India was getting a double benefit thanks to a price cap of $US60 imposed by the West on every barrel of Russian oil traded around the world.
Winning, and winning again
Not only was India getting cheap oil for its domestic needs, but it was also refining much of that product and selling it back to Western countries at higher international prices – and in spite of the sanctions.
The difference between the price cap on Russian oil and the international benchmark is currently about $30 a barrel.
Mr Sahdev said it was unlikely India was getting the full difference, pointing to evidence suggesting Russia was clawing back some of the gap through higher shipping and logistics charges.
Nevertheless, he said India was still coming up trumps.
“The actual discount India is getting is maybe $5, maybe $10 a barrel, which is still good compared to the Middle Eastern barrels,” he said.
“Even in that scenario, India is a winner.”
One of the biggest winners from the trade is none other than Mr Ambani’s Reliance Industries.
In the wake of the Ukrainian invasion, Reliance emerged as a major buyer of Russian oil, which was refined in India and onsold to markets including the European Union despite Western sanctions.
The ABC does not suggest Reliance or Mr Ambani did anything unlawful.
Another winner, according to The Financial Times, was an obscure Indian company that came out of seemingly nowhere to become one of the world’s largest vessel operators.
From owning just two tankers in 2021, Gatik Ship Management had by May this year acquired a fleet of 58 vessels.
According to the FT, the company’s remarkable rise appeared to be the work of its biggest client, Russian oil giant Rosneft, whose boss Igor Sechin is nicknamed “Darth Vader” courtesy of his close links to Mr Putin and Russia’s security apparatus.
It is not suggested there are any links between Reliance and Gatik.
Isaac Levi from Finland-based group the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air said the subtle and obvious ways in which the Russia-India oil trade had ballooned made a mockery of efforts to punish Moscow for its aggression.
Values and realpolitik collide
Mr Levi argued the sanctions imposed by the West were not only “quite loose” but poorly enforced, allowing Russia to continue funding its wars efforts in Ukraine.
He also questioned the extent to which India was acting in the interests of its consumers, noting that retail prices for petrol on the subcontinent had not fallen significantly.
“It’s a legal process, obviously, what we call the refining loophole or the laundering of Russian oil,” Mr Levi said.
“The reason they do it is because it’s going to make a few individuals massively rich.
“That’s what we’re calling out for … it’s reducing the impact of the sanctions, it’s allowing Russia to receive massive export revenues.
“And it seems kind of mad that the EU and countries like Australia are importing these products.”
Professor Hall said seeing the world in such binary terms failed to grasp India’s own worldview.
He said India, almost more than any other country on Earth, was “obsessed with this idea of strategic autonomy” and acting in its own interests.
What’s more, he said it was a country on the rise, as shown by the nature of its oil trade with Russia – a relationship in which India was now the dominant partner.
For these reasons and more, he said India would continue to occupy a peculiar position as both friendly towards the US and its allies without being an ally itself or a critic of supposed pariahs such as Russia.
As such, he said efforts to draw Delhi closer to the West on defence and security matters – especially through the grouping of India, the US, Japan and Australia known as the Quad – were likely to have hard limits.
“Values come into it sometimes,” Professor Hall said.
“But most of the time, the space for them is pretty circumscribed.
“In the end, really, it’s about our interests.
“The Russia relationship does put limits on what we can do and also the willingness to go further, if you like, with India.”
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