By Ramishah Maruf, CNN
Billionaire Indian industrialist Gautam Adani has been charged with paying hundreds of millions of dollars of bribes and hiding the payments from investors, US prosecutors say. Photo: AFP / PUNIT PARANJPE
Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and other executives have been indicted in New York for roles in a multi-billion-dollar fraud scheme, the US Department of Justice says.
Authorities said Adani and seven other senior business executives, including his nephew Sagar Adani, promised more than US$250 million in bribes to Indian government officials to secure solar energy contracts.
Those bribes were "to lie to investors and banks to raise billions of dollars, and to obstruct justice," said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lisa Miller in a statement Wednesday.
Worth more than $85 billion, Adani is Asia's second-richest person behind countryman Mukesh Ambani, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. He is the founder of sprawling Indian conglomerate Adani Group.
The solar energy supply contracts were projected to raise more than $2b 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 summarising various bribe amounts and PowerPoint and Excel analyses "that summarised 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 capitalise off a lucrative contract by the Indian government. The SEC said Adani Green raised more than $175m 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 $80b following the report.
His net worth currently sits at $85.5b on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
In its investigation, which Hindenburg said took two years to compile, the American firm had questioned the "sky-high valuations" of Adani companies and said their "substantial debt" put the entire group "on a precarious financial footing". Short-sellers make money by betting that a company's stock will fall.
The Adani Group published a 400-page rebuttal, calling the Hindenburg analysis "nothing but a lie".
Adani is a seen as a close ally of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and began his career in diamond trading. He set up a commodity trading business in 1988, which later evolved into Adani Enterprises, and now has firms in key sectors ranging from ports and power to media and clean energy.
CNN has reached out to Adani Enterprises for comment.
CNN's Diksha Madhok contributed to this report.
- CNN