Mumbai: In every interview or speech at any public platform, Anmol Singh Jaggi has always emphasised on how he came from a middle-class disciplined family being the son of an Army officer.
The Gensol founder talked about how he is a first-generation entrepreneur who was academically trained to be a petroleum engineer, but walked away from a job in hand, far away from petroleum towards clean energy. He talked about how he has tried to ensure his business is sustainable, and not dependent on any one large grant or private equity funding.
Jaggi’s humble story and the growth of his companies, mainly under the brands of Gensol and BluSmart, seemed almost inspirational: the stuff of conferences and seminars designed to motivate youngsters to take the entrepreneurial plunge.
However, 18 years since Jaggi started his first company, Gensol Engineering Limited, with his brother Puneet Singh Jaggi, the threads of his story, that of being a first-generation hard working entrepreneur, have come undone.
On Tuesday, the Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI), in an interim order, flagged how the funds of Gensol Engineering were being routed to related parties and used for unconnected expenses as if it was the founders’ “personal piggy bank.” Some of the financial irregularities listed by SEBI include diverting funds for the purchase of a luxury residential property for Rs 42.94 crore in an upscale project called ‘The Camellias’ in Gurugram, and even purchase of golf equipment worth Rs 26 lakh.
“There is a set of founders who start off with the right intent, but then get carried away with the money and power that they get, and then after that they find themselves lost. Because of the money and power, for a certain time, they are surrounded by all sorts of people who disappear once things go wrong,” independent market analyst Ambareesh Baliga told ThePrint.
In the case of Gensol, Baliga said, there were some warning bells even about one-and-a-half or two years ago, but when everything is going well on paper, “the naysayers find it difficult to make themselves heard.”
“The kind of growth they showed was stupendous, too good to be true. But when you are in the midst of it, and you are backed by the right PR, and everyone seems to be talking good about you, then the naysayers are silent,” he said.
SEBI has halted a proposed stock split of Gensol’s shares, barred the promoters—Jaggi and his brother Puneet Singh Jaggi—from holding the position of director, and prohibited the duo and Gensol from buying, selling or dealing in securities either directly or indirectly. SEBI will also appoint a forensic auditor to inspect the books of accounts of Gensol and related parties within six months.
Behind SEBI’s strongly-worded order is a classic tale of alleged corporate chicanery that involve closely-linked transactions between two companies raising conflict of interest, supposedly forged documents from lenders, questions by ratings agencies, an exodus of key personnel and founders who, as the SEBI order indicates, looked to secure their own interests over the investors.
“There are many Gensols still hiding in the cupboard, waiting to tumble out with time. Let’s hope it’s not too late by then,” investor and market expert Vijay Kedia said in a post on ‘X’.
He listed out ten red flags in any company such as talking big and over promising, maintaining constant media presence, frequently raising funds without clarity on deployment, overuse of flashy buzzwords such as AI-powered, next-gen or disruptive, engage in excessive related party transactions and so on.
Jaggi did not respond to ThePrint’s calls and text messages, while both Gensol and BluSmart did not respond to emails seeking a comment.
Also Read: MMRDA adopts new compensation policy for key Mumbai infra projects to cut time, cost overruns
How Jaggi’s green turned red
As per the SEBI’s interim order, it had received a complaint from an investor about the alleged manipulation of share price and diversion of funds from Gensol in June 2024. This is when the SEBI started investigating Gensol.
Gensol was listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange’s SME platform in October 2019 and on the BSE and National Stock Exchange’s (NSE) main board in July 2023.
Gensol Engineering provides solar consultancy and EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) services. It also leases electric vehicles. BluSmart Mobility Private Limited is one of its main clients.
BluSmart, which was founded by Jaggi, Puneet along with co-founder Punit Goyal in 2019, is a ride-hailing company that exclusively provides electric vehicles. When the company started off in 2019, its model was to be a fleet operator, listing its vehicles on Uber. It gradually moved to maintaining its own fleet and hired drivers as employees. It started in Delhi-NCR first, then spread to Bengaluru, Dubai and Mumbai.
In its early days, the company got some celebrity interest too with actor Deepika Padukone’s family office investing in the firm as part of a $3 million angel round in 2019. In 2024, cricketer MS Dhoni’s family office invested in the firm among other investors as part of a $24 million pre-Series B funding round.
When Gensol decided to venture into manufacturing electric vehicles, there was a general assumption among investors that BluSmart would be its biggest client. In Gensol’s earnings calls, when the company announced that it had already received 30,000 pre-orders from fleet operators, one investor even said he was assuming the initial order was from BluSmart and if there are any advances given by the company. Jaggi responded saying BluSmart was a small component of the total number of pre-orders and the company had not taken advances from anyone.
Moreover, as per the SEBI order, when an NSE official visited the plant, there was little to no activity at the plant with only two or three labourers present.
This arrangement between Gensol and BluSmart, both companies of the same founder, with one being publicly listed, was already giving some discomfort to shareholders. It raises questions of conflict of interest—whether the leasing terms can be amended to Gensol’s favour and how losses or defaults at BluSmart can affect Gensol, when any potential revenue benefits won’t be passed on as Gensol doesn’t own any stake in the company.
“Theoretically many things can go wrong, but theoretically nothing can go wrong either. It is a question of many ifs,” Deven Choksey, managing director of DR Choksey Finserv Private Limited, told ThePrint. “From an outside perspective, this relation between the two companies was well known. If there have been related company transactions, it is part of a statutory audit report that’s reflected somewhere. When the regulator cleared the Initial Public Offering, it might have been an oversight on their part.”
Then last month, ratings agencies CARE Ratings and ICRA Limited downgraded their ratings for Gensol’s credit facilities. While the ICRA cited “feedback from the company’s lenders about the ongoing delays in debt servicing,” it also referred to Gensol’s business linkages with BluSmart, a loss-making entity.
According to the latest available financials sourced from Tofler, one of India’s largest private company research platforms, BluSmart widened its consolidated loss to Rs 21.59 crore in 2022-23 from Rs 10.03 crore the previous year.
On Wednesday, there were reports of BluSmart commuters being stranded in Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai as the cab hailing firm abruptly suspended its services.
The ICRA also said that certain documents shared by Gensol on its debt servicing track record were apparently falsified. In an investor release on 5 March, Gensol had categorically denied any involvement in claims of falsification.
According to the SEBI order, the stock exchange regulator had called the ratings agencies with regards to its investigation into Gensol. They informed SEBI that Gensol had provided statements of all loans, except for those taken from the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA) Limited and the Power Finance Corporation (PFC). For these two lenders, Gensol issued conduct letters saying that the company was regular in its debt servicing.
The matter didn’t end there. IREDA and PFC denied ever issuing any such letters and instead gave a laundry list of loans that were overdue with the first instance of default being on 31 December, 2024.
Amid the ratings downgrades, there were also reports of BluSmart’s senior management—chief executive Anirudh Arun, chief business officer Tushar Garg, chief technology officer Rishabh Sood, and vice president of experience Priya Chakravarthy—stepping down. The same month, Gensol’s chief financial officer Ankit Jain also resigned.
Also Read: Stuck for two decades, plans for Pune’s Purandar airport once again gain momentum
Alleged diversion of funds to related parties
In its order, SEBI said Gensol received loans of Rs 977.75 crore from IREDA and PFC between fiscal 2022 and fiscal 2024, of which Rs 663.89 crore was meant for the purchase of electric vehicles. Gensol was further expected to put an additional equity contribution of 20 percent, bringing the total corpus to buy electric vehicles to Rs 829.86 crore.
In a response to the regulator in February 2025, Gensol said it had purchased 4,704 electric vehicles till date and leased them out to BlueSmart. Gensol’s stated supplier, Go-Auto Private Limited, confirmed it had purchased 4,704 electric vehicles for Rs 567.73 crore.
SEBI noticed a gap in numbers. “Based on these figures, an amount of Rs. 262.13 crore remains unaccounted, even though more than a year has passed since the company availed the last tranche of the above mentioned financing,” the SEBI order said.
SEBI’s investigation showed that the funds that were transferred from Gensol to Go-Auto for the purchase of electric vehicles were in most cases transferred back to the company or routed to entities directly or indirectly related to Jaggi, Puneet and other promoters and directors of Genosl.
The funds were then used allegedly for a wide variety of purposes—personal expenses of the promoters such as the flat in The Camellias, the golf set and even travel expenses; and benefit to private promoter entities or transfer of funds to close relatives. The companies to which the Jaggi brothers routed funds also features Third Unicorn, the startup of Bharat Pe founder Asneet Grover.
The related parties to which funds were transferred through Go-Auto include companies such as Capbridge Ventures, Matrix Gas and Renewable, Param Care Private Limited, Gensol Consultant Private Limited, GoSolar Ventures and so on.
Capbridge and Matrix were key firms that allegedly enabled the Jaggi brothers to buy the luxury apartment. In September 2022, Jaggi’s mother Jaswinder Kaur paid Rs 5 crore as advance to DLF for booking the apartment. In October 2022, Go-Auto had transferred Rs 50 crore to Capbridge, and the latter, within three days paid Rs 42.94 crore for the apartment to DLF.
SEBI said, the Rs 5 crore that Kaur paid as advance was sourced from Gensol, but when DLF returned the sum, instead of the money going back to Gensol, it was transferred to Matrix.
Funds were also routed to Wellray Solar Industries Private Limited, in which Anmol and Puneet were directors till April 2020, and the company is now owned by Lalit Solanki, who was working with Gensol till 2018, SEBI said, citing Solanki’s LinkedIn profile. SEBI found instances of significant sales and purchases between the two companies and most of Wellray’s revenues being booked through Gensol.
According to SEBI, Wellray received Rs 424.14 crore from Gensol between fiscal 2022 and fiscal 2024, of which Wellray transferred Rs 382.84 crore to various other entities such as the Jaggi brothers, Gensol Ventures, BluSmart, Capbridge and so on.
“This controversy won’t derail the renewables sector, but the agencies will have to increase their surveillance, the lenders especially. The way money was lent to them without a proper check on end use. That will have to stop,” Baliga said.
Back in 2018, in an interview to The Economic Times, Anmol Singh Jaggi had spoken about the challenges of being a first-generation entrepreneur. “The first part of your journey is the toughest. The next 30 years are going to be the easier ones. So, I hope to scale up the growth rates,” he said.
Jaggi’s challenges, though, are still far from over.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
Also Read: Byju Raveendran plans to ‘rise again’ with ‘sooner than expected’ relaunch of firm with ex-staffers