Indian police said a dozen people have been arrested as they probe more oil company employees in a case involving the alleged sale of files stolen from India’s Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.
Seven more people were detained on Friday following five arrests on Tuesday when New Delhi police detected the theft of the papers, New Delhi police spokesman Rajan Bhagat said. Officials from Reliance Industries Ltd, Essar Group, Cairn India Ltd, Jubilant Energy NV and Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group Ltd were among those detained on Friday, the police said.
Officers laid a trap for the men arrested on Tuesday, who they said had faked identification cards, copied keys and disabled closed circuit TV cameras to take files from the ministry. Some of them are current or former employees at Shastri Bhawan buildings — which also houses government departments including the ministry.
“Stolen documents were sold at various prices,” police officer Sunil Kumar said on Friday in New Delhi.
Reliance Industries is the operator of the world’s biggest oil refining complex. Its shares slumped 3.2 percent at the close in Mumbai on Friday.
The company is locked in a dispute with the government over extraction levels from natural gas deposits off India’s east coast.
Mumbai-based Reliance Industries spokesman Tushar Pania said “as of now we don’t have any statement” when contacted by telephone on Saturday. Essar spokesman Manish Kedia said the company could not confirm anything.
Cairn India spokesman Arun Arora said he needed to check on the matter. An operator who picked up a phone call to Jubilant Energy said to call back on Monday.
“We’re not aware of the circumstances in which one of our junior employees has allegedly been arrested,” Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group spokesman Daljeet Singh said. “We’ll ensure full cooperation with the investigative agencies. The company adheres to the highest standards of corporate governance, and does not support any unlawful practices.”
Two energy consultants are also among those arrested, Delhi Police Commissioner B.S. Bassi said on Friday. Officers have also found files leaked from the India’s Ministry of Coal and Ministry of Power.
A car with an unauthorized sign declaring that the vehicle belonged to the government of India was seized after the Tuesday police operation. Officers raided a “few corporate houses,” the Times of India newspaper reported on Thursday, without saying where it got the information.
Petroleum and Gas Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Friday said his ministry is helping the police. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept to power in May last year partly on a vow to clean up government after past scandals over the allocation of mobile phone airwaves and coal mining rights.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
RSS