Sri Lanka (Commonwealth Union)_ Cash-strapped Sri Lanka approved a $442 million wind power project of the Adani group on Thursday, marking the country’s first big foreign investment since declaring bankruptcy. Sri Lanka’s Board of Investment announced that Adani Green Energy, a subsidiary of the controversial corporate empire of industrialist Gautam Adani, will construct two wind farms in the island’s northern region.
According to the latest statement from the BOI, the total investment will exceed $442 million, and the two farms will be generating power for the national grid by 2025. Earlier in 2021, Sri Lanka granted the Adani company a major port terminal project worth $700 million in Colombo. The Indian government had chosen the Adani Company as the contractor in an effort to assuage New Delhi’s rising concerns over China’s growing influence in the country.
The company is constructing a 1.4-kilometer-long, 20-meter-deep pier adjacent to a Chinese-operated terminal in Colombo Harbor, which is the only deep-sea container port between Dubai and Singapore. On account of the mega wind power project, Energy Minister Kanchana Wijesekera held meetings with Adani representatives on Wednesday in Colombo to make final decisions. He expressed hopes that the power plants will be operational by December 2024. The development comes on the heels of a crash in which $120 billion in market capitalization of the Adani group was lost after a US investment company accused firms in the group of accounting fraud and price manipulation a month ago.
In 2019, a Chinese company was granted a $12 million project backed by the Asian Development Bank to construct three wind farms on islands in the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka; however, the project was withdrawn amid concerns from New Delhi. Around 52% of Sri Lanka’s bilateral financing comes from China, making it the country’s most important government lender. Colombo is now waiting for financial assurances from Beijing in order to release a $2.9 billion rescue package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
