Adani Ports appointed MSKA & Associates as its statutory auditors after Deloitte Haskins & Sells LLP resigned.
The appointment at billionaire Gautam Adani’s ports business is effective from August 12 until the date of its next annual general meeting to be held in 2024, the company said in a filing.
The Indian unit of Deloitte raised concerns in May over transactions between Adani Ports and three entities that Adani said were unrelated parties. Deloitte said at the time it couldn’t verify Adani’s claims or determine if the business was fully compliant with local laws. Bloomberg News reported Friday that Deloitte planned to resign.
Deloitte Haskins and Sells said in a letter that it’s tendering its resignation because “we are not statutory auditors of a substantial number of other Adani Group of companies.”
Because Deloitte couldn’t look into the accounts of several other group companies and its transactions with each other, suppliers or customers, it had to qualify its audit of the company, as per its auditor notes dated May 30.
The reasons for Deloitte’s resignation “were not convincing or sufficient to warrant such a move,” GK Pillai, the chairman of Adani Port’s audit committee, said in the statement. Since the port boards of other group companies were independent entities in their own right, it wasn’t within Adani Group’s “remit” to recommended “group-wide appointments,” Pillai said.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India is expected to file a report on its investigation into Adani Group’s accounting and corporate governance on Monday.
