What SEBI found in Suzlon's books?

Akshara· Host0:00

[upbeat music] In today's episode, we'll break down two important stories. First, we'll talk about how Suzlon survived by selling to itself, and then we talk about the cost of defending the rupee. Welcome back to The Daily Briefing by Zerodha, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I'm your host, Akshara. Today is Tuesday, second June. Coming to the first story. So in March 2014, Suzlon Energy sold one of its businesses for rupees 2,000 crore. About 26 times what the business was worth on its own accounts. It would have been a remarkable sale, but for the fact that the buyer wasn't some outside investor, it was a subsidiary it had set up itself. In a year when its group was bleeding money, the company booked a profit of nearly rupees 1,923 crore, and in an order dated 29th May 2026, SEBI looked at that sale and a handful of similar deals, calling them what they were, a way for a company on the edge of collapse to look healthier than it actually was. You probably know Suzlon as one of the Indian market's great turnaround stories, a wind energy company that fell to a penny stock before clawing its way to becoming a near 80,000 crore rupee giant. This is the story of how it bought the time to do just that. Now, to understand why it would bother dressing its books, you need to understand how close Suzlon came to going under. So Suzlon was founded in 1995 by Tulsi