U.S. indicts Indian billionaire Gautam Adani in $265 million bribery scheme

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 $265 million bribery scheme.

Gautam Adani, 62, was charged in an 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 portrays Adani and his co-defendants of 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 while, back in India, they were paying or planning to pay about $265 million in bribes to government officials in exchange for billions of dollars’ worth of contracts and financing.

Adani and his co-defendants allegedly 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.

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. 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 the comment. The others did not immediately respond.

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.”

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Adani is the 19th richest person in the world with an estimated total net worth of about $85.5 billion. However, that is down significantly from 2022, when he briefly overtook Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as No. 2 on the list with a net worth of more than $146 billion. 

He 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, Adani has made big moves into renewable energy, embracing a philosophy of sustainable growth reflected in its slogan: “Growth with Goodness.”

Last year, 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.”

The firm in question is known as a short-seller, a Wall Street term for traders that essentially bet on the prices of certain stocks to fall, and it had made such investments in relation to the Adani Group.