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22-11-2024
NEW YORK: Indian billionaire Gautam Adani has been charged with fraud in the US, which has accused him of orchestrating a $250m (£198m) bribery scheme and concealing it to raise money in the US.
The criminal charges, filed on Wednesday in New York, are the latest blow to 62-year-old Adani, one of Asia’s richest men, whose business empire extends from ports and airports to renewable energy.
In the indictment, prosecutors alleged the tycoon and other senior executives had agreed to the payments to Indian officials to win contracts for his renewable energy company expected to yield more than $2bn in profits over 20 years.
The Adani Group has denied the allegations, calling them “baseless”.
“All possible legal recourse will be sought,” it said in a statement.
Shares of Adani Enterprises, the group’s flagship firm, closed down 22% on Thursday. Other group firms also closed in the red. Adani Green Energy, which is the firm at the centre of the allegations, said it wouldn’t proceed with a $600m bond offering.
The conglomerate has been operating under a cloud since 2023, when US short-seller Hindenburg Research published a report accusing it of decades of “brazen” stock manipulation and accounting fraud.
The claims, which Adani denied, prompted a major market sell-off and an investigation by India’s market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi).
Later, Hindenburg also accused Sebi’s chief Madhabi Puri Buch of having links with off-shore funds used by the Adani group both Buch and the group have denied this but the US indictment is one of the biggest challenges the group has faced. Apart from Adani there are seven other defendants, including his nephew.
Reports of the bribery probe into the company have been circulating for months.
Prosecutors said the US started investigating the company in 2022, and found the inquiry obstructed.
They allege that executives raised $3bn in loans and bonds, including from US firms, on the backs of false and misleading statements related to the firm’s anti-bribery practices and policies, as well as reports of the bribery probe.
“As alleged, the defendants orchestrated an elaborate scheme to bribe Indian government officials to secure contracts worth billions of dollars and… lied about the bribery scheme as they sought to raise capital from US and international investors,” US Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement announcing the charges.
“My office is committed to rooting out corruption in the international marketplace and protecting investors from those who seek to enrich themselves at the expense of the integrity of our financial markets,” he added.
On several occasions Adani met personally with government officials to advance the bribery scheme, officials said.
The US Attorney positions in the US are appointed by the president. The filing comes just weeks after Donald Trump won election to the White House, pledging to overhaul the US Justice Department.
After Trump won, Adani had congratulated him on social media and pledged last week to invest $10bn in the US.
Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center, called the charges a “body blow” to the tycoon.
“For the last nearly two years, Adani has been trying to rehabilitate his image, and [trying] to show that those earlier fraud allegations levelled by the Hindenburg group were not true, and his company and his businesses had actually been doing quite well,” he told media. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
