Tamil Nadu signs Rs 12,300 crore London MoUs on Vijay's first foreign trip

Tamil Nadu's government signed a set of memoranda in London on Monday that it values at about Rs 12,300 crore and more than 9,400 jobs. Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay was present for the exchanges. It is his first official trip abroad since taking office. He left Chennai at 10.05 p.m. on 11 September, flying via Dubai, with a brief that named advanced manufacturing, electric vehicles, electronics and Global Capability Centres.

The largest sheet belongs to Samvardhana Motherson International and its European and UK joint ventures. Guidance Tamil Nadu, the state's investment agency, recorded an investment of about Rs 11,000 crore over five years for Design, Engineering, Manufacturing, Assembly and Logistics plants. The state says those plants will employ about 7,000 people. Barry Painter, the group's global head of marketing and communications, signed opposite Deepak Jacob, IAS, managing director of Guidance. High Commissioner Kumaran Periyasamy attended.

Ernst & Young committed about Rs 1,000 crore for a Global Capability Centre on the new GCC corridor on Mount Poonamallee Road in Chennai, with more than 2,000 jobs. The government note said EY signed on behalf of a client that it did not name. Sigma Technology Group of Sweden, through its Indian unit Zriya Solutions (one report called it Sria Solutions), said it would expand centres in Chennai and Tiruchirappalli and add about 600 jobs in embedded systems, electrification and industrial digitalisation. Wilson Power Solutions of the United Kingdom signed for a Rs 300 crore plant in Thiruvallur district and 400 jobs.

AIADMK spokesman Kovai Sathyan used the Motherson sheet against the trip. The company was incorporated in India in 1986 and is headquartered in Noida. He asked why the chief minister needed a taxpayer-funded flight to London to sign with a firm that already operates in India. Photographs of Vijay and actor Trisha at Ajith Kumar's Le Mans Cup event at Silverstone had already given the opposition a second line of attack. The government answered with the rupee total and the job count.

An official release issued when Vijay left Chennai said the TVK-led government had signed MoUs above Rs 1 lakh crore inside 100 days, and that European firms had proposed about Rs 8,491 crore and 5,690 jobs before this week. It also pointed to the India-UK Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, in force since 15 July, as the legal background for the London meetings. MoUs are not cheques. They are statements of intent that still need land, power, environmental clearances and board approvals. The political test in Chennai will be how many of the 9,400 named jobs appear on payrolls before the next Assembly calendar forces the question again.

For Motherson the London venue let its European joint-venture partners stand in the same room as Guidance. For Vijay the venue let him show a foreign trip that produced paper with numbers. Both facts can be true at once. The Noida headquarters does not cancel the UK legal entities on the signature block. It does explain why the opposition will keep repeating the year 1986.