Gautam Adani, chair of India’s Adani Group and one of the world’s richest people, was indicted with seven other men in New York federal court on charges related to a massive bribery and fraud scheme.
The 62-year-old billionaire and two executives in Adani Green Energy Limited, his nephew Sagar Adani and Vneet Jaain, are charged with misleading U.S. and international investors about their company’s compliance with antibribery and anticorruption practices as they raised more than $3 billion in capital to fund those energy contracts.
Both Adanis and Jaain are charged with securities fraud conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy and securities fraud.
The solar energy supply contracts were projected to raise more than $2 billion in profits after tax over an approximately 20-year period.
Authorities said Adani personally met with an Indian government official to advance the scheme, which took place between 2020 to 2024. The defendants frequently met and discussed the bribery scheme, including evidence on several phones.
Some of that documentation included a cell phone to extensively track specific details on the bribes, a photograph of a document summarizing various bribe amounts and PowerPoint and Excel analyses “that summarized various options for paying and concealing bribe payments,” the Department said in its statement.
Adani and his associates tried to hide these bribery schemes from US investors “in order to obtain financing, including to fund those solar energy supply contracts procured through bribery,” the DOJ said.
In a parallel action, the Securities and Exchange Commission also charged both Adanis (as executives of Adani Green Energy Ltd) and Cyril Cabanes, an executive of Azure Power Global, for the bribery scheme that the SEC said allowed both companies to capitalize off a lucrative contract by the Indian government. The SEC said Adani Green raised more than $175 million from US investors on those misrepresentations.
Adani was accused by the US short-seller Hindenburg Research of a “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme” in January 2023. Adani’s fortune – which at one point in 2022 was worth more than Jeff Bezos – plummeted over $80 billion following the report.
Source: CNBC
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