Gautam Adani, chair of Indian conglomerate Adani Group, addresses a gathering during the Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit 2024 in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India, Jan. 10, 2024.
Punit Paranjpe | AFP | Getty Images
Gautam Adani, chair of India’s Adani Group and one of the world’s richest people, was indicted with others on bribery and fraud charges unsealed Wednesday in federal court in New York.
Adani and other defendants are accused of paying Indian government officials more than $250 million in bribes to obtain solar energy supply contracts worth more than $2 billion in profits.
The 62-year-old and two executives in Adani Green Energy Limited — his nephew Sagar Adani and Vneet Jaain — are also charged with misleading U.S. and international investors about their company’s compliance with anti-bribery and anti-corruption practices as they raised more than $3 billion in capital to fund the energy contracts.
The five-count indictment in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn also charged Ranjit Gupta and Rupash Agarwal, former executives in the renewable-energy company Azure Power Global, and three former employees of the Canadian institutional investor Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec: Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal and Deepak Malhotra.
A worker walks past rows of solar panels at the Adani Group- owned Khavda Renewable Energy Park in Khavda, India, Jan. 12, 2024.
Punit Paranjpe | Afp | Getty Images
Those defendants are accused of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection with the bribery scheme by Adani and the others at the energy company.
Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal, Malhotra and Rupash Agarwal are also accused of conspiring to obstruct U.S. federal criminal and Securities and Exchange Commission investigations into the bribery scheme.
The SEC filed civil complaints Wednesday against Gautam Adani and Sagar Agani, as well as against Cabanes, who is an executive at Azure Power Global, in connection with alleged bribery that enabled Adani Green Energy and Azure to capitalize on solar energy contracts awarded by India’s government.
The SEC’s complaints note that during the alleged scheme, Adani Green raised more than $175 million from U.S. investors, and Azure’s stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
“Gautam and Sagar Adani orchestrated a bribery scheme that involved paying or promising to pay the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian government officials to secure their commitment to purchase energy at above-market rates that would benefit Adani green and Azure Power,” the SEC said.
“Cabanes allegedly facilitated the authorization of bribes in furtherance of the scheme while in the United States and abroad,” the agency said.
Gautam Adani is the second richest person in Asia, with a reported net worth of $85 billion.
He lost tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth in early 2023 when the short-selling firm Hindenburg Research published a report accusing the Adani Group of engaging “in a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades.”
Hindenburg’s report called it “the largest con in corporate history.”
Adani issued a 413-page response to Hindenburg, calling the allegations baseless.
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