Nehal Chaliawala

Rules often seem to bend when some of India's top conglomerates are involved. Here are two Mint stories that explore seemingly inconsistent applicability of rules to Reliance and Adani Group as compared to others. Reliance, stock exchange silence on Trump's claims test limits of Sebi's disclosure norms livemint.com/companies/news… LIC’s curious vote trail: With Reliance and Adani on one side, everyone else on the other livemint.com/companies/news…

Global aviation veteran William Walsh is the new IndiGo CEO! Walsh is a former Director General of IATA and CEO of British Airways and IAG. @livemint

Noticing that its partners are getting nervous because of the energy/economic fallout of the Iran war, the US smartly managed the narrative by "allowing" India to buy Russian oil. India was already buying seaborn Russian oil and has never formally acknowledged that it would stop buying it as part of the trade deal with Trump. India hasn't commented on the US giving it "permission" to do what it was already doing. Narrative wise, the US seems to have the better of this exchange though. And narratives are crucial in geopolitics. India is keeping its cards close to the chest; I wouldn't be surprised if we are letting this narrative slide for a strategic upper hand later. I could be wrong and we may have just given in to bullying. I would like to believe otherwise though.

Why Iran-Israel war is a triple blow to Indian airlines: IndiGo, Air India, Air India Express -Cancellations -Cost escalation -Currency volatility Take a look at the full report #IranIsraelWar #IranWar #USIran

Today we face an external environment in which trade and multilateralism are in peril, Finance Minister @nsitharaman said.

Modi and Costa were measured, but von der Leyen pulled no punches! Wow.

No analysis of #Iran is complete if you reduce what's unfolding in the country into a simplistic binary of an oppressive regime vs a freedom-loving people. That's a liberal trap. I have serious disagreements with the character of the Iranian state (which I have with a lot of regimes), but that doesn't stop me from trying to understand the broader picture. Iran has lived under crippling sanctions for decades--and those who imposed the sanctions wanted to make everyday life miserable in the hope that the public would rise against the regime which would open a window for the liberal interventionists. Why is Iran under sanctions? Mainly because of its nuclear programme. Iran exists in a very hostile region. Just look at the map -- Iran is the only Persian Gulf country that doesn't host an American military base. It sits in a region where Israel is the only nuclear power. The mistake Iran did -- as I have always argued -- was that it did not make the bomb. They thought they could leverage a nuclear threshold status for both security and economic relief. That was a blunder in a world of jungle. Tehran signed the nuclear deal in 2015. Trump demolished it in 2018 and reimposed sanctions. Europe just follows the line given from Washington. Despite the hostility in the region, Iran enjoyed relative deterrence due its so-called axis of resistance. The US first killed Soleimani, one of the architects of the axis. And then Israel, post-Oct 7, with American help, chipped away at the axis. Because for both Israel and the US, Iran is the only revisionist power in West Asia. You take Syria out, Iran would be weakened. And you take Iran out, the whole region could be redrawn. Look at what happened. Hamas was pushed into the ruins of Gaza. Hezbollah has been degraded. Houthis are fighting their own battles. And the Syrian regime, Iran's only state ally in the region, collapsed. Russia is stuck in Ukraine. China remains too self-occupied. Iran suddenly lay vulnerable to external threats. And then the Israelis bombed Iran in June. Trump happily joined in. Europe followed suit in the subsequent months by reimposing snapback sanctions--because Iran violated a deal that Trump killed in 2018! In the middle of all this, Iran had elected a reformist as its president in an election in which more than 30 million people voted. But the government’s hands were tied when it came to economic issues because of the sanctions. And there is genuine public resentment which was what triggered the shopkeepers' protests on January 1. But on Jan 2, after meeting Netanyahu in Florida, Trump said he was “locked and loaded”. Mossad started amplifying anti-regime messages in Farsi via social media. It even posted on X that “we are with you in the field” (I wrote here on X on the day the US attacked Venezuela and abducted President Maduro that Iran was next). The protests started turning violent. Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed monarch who is living in the US, suddenly emerged as the “Crown Prince”. Someone who hasn’t set foot in Iran for over four decades, emerged in western TV and press as the rightful voice of Iran’s opposition and he called for urgent American bombing of Iran! Garbage propaganda channels such as Iran International unleashed a firestorm of misinformation. Reports about the situation on the ground came from “rights groups” based in Oslo and Washington. The liberal mills, which were conspicuously silent during Israel’s genocide of Palestinians for two years, started firing on all cylinders. Iran, they said, wants freedom through American and Israeli bombings. And now Trump is asking the “protesters” to take over institutions. #IranProtests

Adani Group's internal project manager to raise $1 billion via dollar-denominated bonds amid massive capex surge (@NehalChaliawala reports) livemint.com/market/bonds/a…

Pune Porsche case: Bombay HC denies bail to the builder father and six others. 1) Dad orchestrated the entire cover-up. 2) Mom walked into hospital and gave her own blood to replace her son's sample. 3) Doctors took ₹3 lakhs to swap the vials, forge the MLC register, and issue fake "Nil Alcohol" certificates. A medical student was used to stash the bribe money. But it gets worse. The father of another teen in the car paid a business associate ₹2 lakhs to provide his blood to swap for his son's sample. And when the first hospital fix started getting heat, the parents and middlemen approached a *second* hospital to rig that test too. That doctor refused. Bombay HC denied bail to all of them today. Justice Chandak held that faking biological evidence constitutes forgery of a "valuable security" punishable by life imprisonment. The Court noted they showed "no respect to the dead" and "insulted their death" by treating the justice system as something money could buy."

Breaking on @livemint first. NCLT Mumbai approved the @Vedanta_Group demerger scheme. Company court rejected the govt opposition to the demerger. The detail judgement yet to be out. @DevinaSengupta livemint.com/companies/veda…

LIC, over the last 14 quarters, never opposed any shareholder resolutions by Reliance or Adani. It opposed similar resolutions by others, including Tata Group, Aditya Birla Group and Bajaj. See -- x.com/NehalChaliawal…

A day after our report on LIC's voting history which demonstrably favoured Reliance and Adani, the insurer has offered a comment. It hasn't answered why these contradictions exist, just said that it doesn't vote with any biad. Icymi, the thread below explains the story --

@notoriousjatt85 @livemint Aren't you curious why there are these demonstrable contradictions in India's largest money manager's voting decisions? Globally, institutions of similar size have clearly defined voting guidelines that they follow. Then why not at LIC?

I'm curious as to why mint journalists are curious? #MintReports #LIC @livemint @NehalChaliawala

@SriniKay @livemint Thank you, sir.

Terrific story in @livemint today. Good job, @NehalChaliawala

@varunstweets @livemint @livemint has a nice thread on this when some charts. Check it out. x.com/livemint/statu…

Fin Apologies for the bad spelling. AI is only so good. If you liked this thread, I'm sure you will enjoy reading @varunstweets and my story on @livemint livemint.com/companies/news…

We went through over 9,000 resolutions on which LIC voted since its IPO We found a curious pattern -- India's largest institutional investor seemingly plays favourites. It never voted against the big 2 even as it opposed resolutions by others. Read on, it's a good one 🧵