In 2015, a man who had recently arrived in Perth walked into a luxury car dealership and made a straightforward request.
He wanted to buy a Ferrari.
The price tag was $750,000.
So he went to a bank, withdrew the money in cash, and took the keys to the car.
Although unknown to virtually everyone inside Western Australia at the time, that man's name is increasingly being whispered along the corridors of power in Perth's political and business districts.
He is Dev Sindhu, the scion of a rich Indian family that controls a sprawling company at the centre of an energy crisis threatening to take down WA's biggest power system this summer.
Where he came from, what he's like, and how he came to be the mystery man in the middle of an international game of chicken over energy security in Australia has been an untold story — until now.
It's a story linked to India's ruling party, claims of corruption, and vast wealth in a country where more than a billion people live on barely $10 a day.
Arriving without a scene
On the afternoon he walked into the luxury Perth car dealership, though, Mr Sindhu could have been any cashed-up executive looking to splash out.
WA's economy might have come off the boil compared with the boom earlier in the decade, but Perth was still a place where money was flaunted.
What's more, it was still the sort of town that welcomed foreign cash.
To that end, the arrival of Mr Sindhu seemed perfectly in keeping with the zeitgeist.
Around that time, his family's company, Sindhu Trade Links, had taken a stake in an historic WA coal mine via a loan worth $US60 million ($88 million).
That asset, the Griffin Coal Mining Company, had been in Indian hands since conglomerate Lanco Infratech bought it from the wreckage of fallen tycoon Ric Stowe's failed business empire for $750 million in 2010.
The purchase, encouraged by India's central government as part of an outward Indian expansion into energy markets, was largely funded with debt provided by the country's biggest private bank – the giant ICICI.
But the signs that Griffin was struggling under Lanco were already clear by 2015, as losses and debt mounted.
So when Sindhu emerged as another Indian lender to the mine that year, no-one batted an eyelid at the time.
In hindsight, the lack of interest seems at odds with Griffin's importance to WA's energy security.
Money matters
The mine sits at the heart of WA's biggest electricity system in the coal hub of Collie, south of Perth.
Its customers include a big privately owned power plant and it forms one half of a local coal industry that still accounts for about a third of the power used in the state's biggest electricity grid.
Amid renewed turmoil at Griffin, closer inspections have revealed there's more to Sindhu's loan than meets the eye.
Records filed with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission show Sindhu – through its Australian subsidiary Oceania Resources – did indeed lend the $US60 million to Griffin.
But it borrowed the money from none other than ICICI, which held by far the biggest share of Griffin's debt when the miner fell into receivership in September – about $1.1 billion out of $1.5 billion.
Despite borrowing the money from ICICI and being owed less than one tenth as much as the bank, Sindhu somehow ended up as the most senior creditor to the stricken mine.
ICICI had subordinated its own claim.
It means Mr Sindhu and his family will get first dibs on any proceeds that might arise from the sale of the operation, even though their investment was borrowed money from Griffin's biggest lender.
As part of the deal, they also get multi-million-dollar fees to act as Griffin's manager.
Oceania's registered address is a suite in a heritage building in West Perth, the traditional home of the city's small- and medium-sized resources companies.
However, when the ABC visited the office this month, it was told Oceania no longer carried out any business at the address.
Rich family, political royalty
That Sindhu could have been catapulted to the top of the pecking order among Griffin's lenders is perplexing observers of the Griffin affair.
But the Sindhu family has a history of ascending to the top of the pile.
Dev Suman Sindhu is no exception.
The 47-year-old, who hails from the provincial city of Rohtak, an hour-and-a-half north of the capital Delhi, is related to Indian political royalty.
His older brother is Captain Abhimanyu Sindhu, a former state cabinet minister with the Bharatiya Janata Party of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
His wife is the daughter of Delhi's former BJP chief minister, the late Sahib Singh Verma.
He is variously described as inscrutable, "a good guy", and an astute businessman.
Through the family company, he is also wealthy.
Mr Sindhu owns about 7 per cent of the shares on Sindhu Trade Link's register, according to its latest annual report.
And Sindhu Trade Links is a big business, with consolidated revenue in 2022 of almost $190 million and operations that span mining, transport, media and financial interests in multiple countries.
It has a market capitalisation of almost half a billion dollars.
On top of this, Mr Sindhu himself is the chairman of a company called Pacific Hunt Energy, which is seeking to develop oil and gas projects in Myanmar.
For all of its size, the Sindhus' family company has not been without its controversies.
A company with past controversies
In 2009, investigative Indian news outfit Tehelka reported that Sindhu subsidiaries were involved in the fraudulent sale of coal mined by state-owned resources company South Eastern Coalfields in the central state of Chhattisgarh.
Central to the report were claims that the Sindhu subsidiaries washed and then falsely sold higher quality coal at lower grades and received kickbacks from buyers.
In response to ABC questions about the claims, Mr Sindhu confirmed he was not connected with these allegations, and no enquiry or investigation was ever conducted against him in relation to them.
He also pointed to a 2004 finding of India's Central Bureau of Investigation, which found the claims against Sindhu subsidiary Aryan Coal Beneficiation (ACB) were unsubstantiated and there was no evidence of cheating of any other criminal act.
In 2012, India's Daily News & Analysis reported ACB was, along with another entity, Global Coal and Mining, "gifted" coal-rich, former leasehold land courtesy of its political links to the state government of Odisha.
Mr Sindhu told the ABC that he is not connected with Global Coal and Mining in any capacity, nor was he connected with the allotment of the lease in question.
Then in 2019, India's share market watchdog imposed fines on Mr Sindhu and six other "promoters" of the family enterprise over a failure to disclose the release of millions of pledged shares.
Mr Sindhu acknowledged the lapse, but stressed it was inadvertent "as the disclosure document was lost by the courier directed to lodge it".
He also noted an adjudicating officer subsequently found he had complied with the necessary disclosures and a penalty was ordered and paid.
Finally, in 2020, the company was whacked with multiple downgrades by an arm of global ratings giant Fitch, leaving Sindhu with a credit score deemed junk by investors.
Slow burn starts to explode
Responding to previous queries about the financial health of Sindhu and its Australian arm, Oceania Resources, Mr Sindhu said the companies were working in the interests of Griffin and its customers.
"Oceania Resources, as both a lender and operator of the Griffin Coal mine, has worked with and supported the Griffin Coal mine since 2015, and continues to do so," Mr Sindhu, the sole director of Oceania, said last month in response to questions by the ABC.
With Griffin languishing in receivership, attention is now turning to what role Mr Sindhu might play in any plan to drag the embattled miner out of the mire.
The miner's biggest customer, the 440MW Bluewaters power station, typically supplies about 15 per cent of the electricity used in WA's main grid – the south-west interconnected system.
It also provides coal to ASX-listed mining giant South32 via the nearby Worsley alumina refinery.
Griffin's descent into receivership, although long in the making, has precipitated a crisis in the state's coal industry, forcing South32 and even state-owned power provider Synergy to import coal from abroad at extraordinary prices to keep the lights on and industry going.
The upheaval has also set nerves on edge in the power industry about the stability of the electricity system heading into what's forecast to be a scorching summer.
Just as importantly, it's also cast a pall over the future of hundreds of workers employed directly and indirectly by Griffin.
Steve Thomas, the State Upper House Liberal MP representing the area covering Collie, noted Mr Sindhu's involvement in the Griffin affair in a recent speech to Parliament in which he raised concerns about the "murky" nature of Oceania's presence.
Too many bandaids: union
Greg Busson, the state secretary of the Mining and Energy Union, said he was yet to meet Mr Sindhu but wanted to know how Oceania's plans would affect workers and their families.
"At the moment we don't have any details on what Oceania might be proposing," Mr Busson said.
"Whatever happens our primary concern is secure jobs for the employees, a reliable and secure power system for the state and the future of Collie.
"What we are looking for is a longer-term solution to the problems.
"For too long bandaids have been applied.
"The state needs a fully funded, financially viable coal industry going forward under a just transition."
Owners' silence deafening
Even more deafening in its silence has been ICICI, which has still not even publicly acknowledged its exposure to Griffin let alone written down its disastrous position.
With Griffin's licence to mine coal in Collie set to expire in the middle of next year, the clock is ticking on how the saga between the mine's Indian owners, its customers and the state government will be resolved.
A footnote to Mr Sindhu's purchase of a Ferrari that day in 2015 – perhaps apocryphal – is that he barely got to drive the car.
On driving away from the showroom, sources say he discovered Perth's highways had speed limits and was unable to get the low-bodied sports car over the speed humps into his apartment complex.
After those disappointments, he reportedly parked the car in a storage unit for six months, before selling it back to a dealership.
Griffin's workers and customers will be hoping his foray into WA coal ends on a happier note.
