Can legal troubles trip up the Adani group’s ports ambition?

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Editor's note: The Adani group’s ports business is in the midst of multiple legal disputes, the fate of which will determine its chances of bidding for new port infrastructure projects.  Since last year, several port authorities have disqualified the Adani group company from bidding for projects because it failed to perform under an earlier contract. Signed in 2011, the concession agreement between Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone, or APSEZ, and the Visakhapatnam Port was terminated in late 2020 after years of lackluster performance.  These new port projects, being put up on a public-private-partnership basis, are part of the central government’s privatization initiative called the National Infrastructure Pipeline, announced on 15 August 2019 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.  APSEZ, which is now India’s largest private port operator, with a significant share of the cargo market, as we wrote in our story yesterday, could stand to lose out on at least five of these projects, according to court documents. The Adani group did not respond to queries sent last week. The cases APSEZ is currently embroiled in four significant legal battles with port …