Vedanta's Agarwal regrets $8-bn aluminum investment in India

Billionaire Anil Agarwal, who controls London-based Vedanta Resources, said he regrets investing Rs 50,000 crore ($8 billion) on an aluminum complex in India that's faced a shortage of raw materials.

"I could either invest in Vedanta Aluminium or I could have bought Asarco," Agarwal said in an interview with Bloomberg TV India in Delhi aired on Friday, referring to US copper miner Asarco. "If you ask me today, I regret it."

Complex government procedures are delaying project approvals in India and impeding companies, Agarwal said. His Sesa Sterlite has seen its iron-ore business slump following court-imposed mining bans in two states, while the group's failure to obtain a mining permit for bauxite in Odisha has driven the aluminum unit into losses.

"Its aluminum project is a dead investment because of lack of raw material," Giriraj Daga, Mumbai-based analyst at Nirmal Bang Equities, said in a phone interview. "There is no horizon for this business unless they are able to secure their own bauxite."

Industrialists including Agarwal, Naveen Jindal and Kumar Mangalam Birla, have faced project delays in India.

Vedanta lost a bid in 2009 to acquire Asarco for more than $2.5 billion, cheering investors and boosting the company's stock at the time.

"I would have done better if I had bought Asarco," said Agarwal, whose net worth is calculated at $2.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. "It would have been a feather in my cap."

Local tribes
Vedanta Aluminium is running below capacity after failing to get approval from local tribes to mine bauxite.

Vedanta would have been better off by not investing in the aluminum business at all, Abhishek Shukla, an analyst at Societe Generale said in an e-mail. Some factors that make it a poor investment include government red tape and too much spending by the company without clarity on bauxite supplies.

Shares of Sesa Sterlite Ltd, which controls Vedanta Aluminium, gained 4.6 per cent to Rs 183.1 at the close in Mumbai.

Asked if doing business in India is more difficult than elsewhere, Agarwal replied: "That's for sure."

His employees have to run from "table to table" for permission to re-open the company's iron-ore mine in the southern state of Karnataka, months after a court partially lifted a ban on mining there, he said.

Mining bans
India, which exported 101.5 million tonnes of iron ore in the year to March 2010, banned mining in two of the nation's biggest producing states in August 2011 and September last year as it probed charges of illegal mining. Exports dropped to 18 million tonnes in the year ended March 31, while companies have been forced to import, according to the Federation of Indian Mineral Industries. The court-ordered bans have since been eased. Companies still require government clearances.

India has the potential to produce as much as 700 million tonnes of the steel-making ingredient if it simplified its policies and quickened approvals, Agarwal said. The nation produced about 140 million tonnes in the year ended March 31.

Agarwal said he plans to devote most of his personal wealth to philanthropy, in particular, eradicating malnutrition in India under a Vedanta project called 'Khushi'.