The Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group - which is fighting a legal battle for gas from these fields - has said Reliance Industries deliberately inflated the capital expenditure that will result in losses worth billions of dollars to the government.

The Anil Ambani group said based on the original estimate of the gas output of 40 million units a day, when the fields were handed over to Reliance Industries, the capital expenditure was pegged at around $2.5 billion.

How can this more than triple to nearly $9 billion when the output is envisaged to only double to 80 million units, the group queried, even as Reliance Industries as also the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons sought to justify the same.

Petroleum Secretary R.S. Pandey, meanwhile, said an official audit will be conducted on the capital capital expenditure of all major oil and gas discoveries, including the Krishna-Godavari basin and the Panna-Mukta-Tapti fields.