US charges tycoon Gautam Adani with defrauding investors, hiding plan to bribe Indian officials

[November 21, 2024]  By MICHAEL R. SISAK and JENNIFER PELTZ

NEW YORK (AP) — An Indian businessman who is one of the world’s richest people has been indicted in the U.S. on charges he duped investors by concealing that his company's huge solar energy project on the subcontinent was being facilitated by an alleged bribery scheme.

Gautam Adani, 62, was charged in a federal indictment unsealed Wednesday with securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. The case involves a lucrative arrangement for Adani Green Energy Ltd. and another firm to sell 12 gigawatts of solar power to the Indian government — enough to light millions of homes and businesses.

The indictment paints Adani and his co-defendants as playing two sides of the deal.

It accuses them of portraying it as rosy and above-board to Wall Street investors who poured several billion dollars into the project over the last five years while, back in India, they were allegedly paying or planning to pay about $265 million in bribes to government officials to help secure billions of dollars’ worth of contracts and financing.

The tycoon and his co-defendants sought to “obtain and finance massive state energy supply contracts through corruption and fraud at the expense of U.S. investors,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lisa Miller said.

U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said the defendants “orchestrated an elaborate scheme” and sought to “enrich themselves at the expense of the integrity of our financial markets.”

Adani's company in India had no immediate comment, as meanwhile shares in the Adani corporate empire plunged Thursday in India.

Adani’s co-defendants include his nephew Sagar Adani, the executive director of Adani Green Energy’s board, and Vneet Jaain, who was the company’s chief executive from 2020 to 2023 and remains managing director of its board.

Online court records did not list a lawyer who could speak on Adani’s behalf. An email message seeking comment was left with an arm of his conglomerate, the Adani Group. Emails were also sent to lawyers representing his co-defendants.

Sagar Adani’s lawyer, Sean Hecker, declined comment. The others did not immediately respond.

In a parallel civil action, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused Adani and two co-defendants of violating antifraud provisions of U.S. securities laws. The regulator is seeking monetary penalties and other sanctions.

Both cases were filed in federal court in Brooklyn.

Sanjay Wadhwa, acting director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division, said Gautam and Sagar Adani are accused of persuading investors to buy their company's bonds by misrepresenting "not only that Adani Green had a robust anti-bribery compliance program but also that the company’s senior management had not and would not pay or promise to pay bribes.”

Adani is a power player in the world’s most populous nation. He built his fortune in the coal business in the 1990s. The Adani Group grew to involve many aspects of Indian life, from making defense equipment to building roads to selling cooking oil.

In recent years, the Adani Group has made big moves into renewable energy, embracing a philosophy of sustainable growth reflected in its slogan: “Growth with Goodness."

India's Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani addresses the Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit in Gandhinagar, India, Jan.10, 2024. (AP Photo/Ajit Solanki, File)

The company has a clean energy portfolio of over 20 gigawatts, including one of the world’s largest solar power plants in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Adani Group has stated its goal of becoming the country’s biggest player in the space by 2030. In 2022, Gautam Adani said the company would invest $70 billion in clean energy projects by 2032.

Adani's close ties with the government and with Prime Minister Narendra Modi have at the same time drawn criticism, including from India’s opposition Congress party leader Jairam Ramesh. He said in a statement that the indictment was “consistent with a long record of fraud and criminality carried out with impunity with the obvious protection of the prime minister.”

Noting that it took a foreign jurisdiction to produce charges, Ramesh called for a parliamentary inquiry into Adani's activities.

Last year, Hindenburg Research, a U.S.-based financial research firm accused Adani and his company of “brazen stock manipulation” and “accounting fraud.” The Adani Group called the claims “a malicious combination of selective misinformation and stale, baseless and discredited allegations.”

Hindenburg is known as a short-seller, a Wall Street term for traders that essentially bet that prices of certain stocks will fall, and it had made such investments in relation to the Adani Group. The company's stock plunged as a result and dipped again in August when Hindenburg levied more corruption allegations.

Jaain told The Associated Press last year that Hindenburg's allegations had little impact on Adani's ongoing projects, including work building 20 gigawatts of a solar and wind energy project in the northwest Indian village of Khavda.

Prosecutors allege that Adani and his co-defendants started plotting the bribery scheme in 2020 or 2021 to guarantee demand for the energy that Adani Green and another firm were under contract to produce for the national government's Solar Energy Corporation of India.

Adani Green and the other firm’s high prices turned off India's state-run electricity distributors, which buy power from the national government and provide it to homes and businesses. But the companies needed those deals to make the project worthwhile and keep revenues high, so they offered bribes to get them done, prosecutors said.

After the defendants started promising bribes to government officials, in 2021 and 2022, electricity distributors in five Indian states or regions entered into agreements to purchase their energy, prosecutors said. Adani's company issued a statement in which he touted his deals as the “world's largest” power purchase agreement.

At the same time, prosecutors said, the Adanis and Jaain were attesting to global investors that Adani Green was and would never be involved in bribery. Those claims enabled them to secure billions of dollars in financing for the project at terms that “did not account for the true risk” involved, prosecutors said.

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