Gautam Adani charged with ‘Bribery Scheme’ by US prosecutors

Prosecutors in the United States have charged Gautam Adani, chairman of the Adani Group and one of the richest people in the world, with involvement in a scheme that promised or led to the payment of $250 million in bribes to Indian government officials to secure solar energy contracts.

The Adani Group, earlier, had been accused by US-based short-seller Hindenburg Research of using offshore tax havens illegally, a charge that the company has denied.

Prosecutors in Brooklyn, New York, alleged on Wednesday that Adani and other defendants lied about the plan as they sought to raise money from US investors. The five-count indictment also accuses Sagar R. Adani and Vineet S. Jaain among others based in the US, Singapore and India, an Australian national and an Andhra Pradesh state government official identified in court papers as “Foreign Official 1” of breaking US federal laws.

“The defendants orchestrated an elaborate scheme to bribe Indian government officials to secure contracts worth billions of dollars,” Breon Peace, US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement. 

US authorities had been investigating whether Adani Group may have engaged in bribery as well as the conduct of the company’s billionaire founder, Bloomberg reported.

The defendants conspired to obstruct justice by deleting electronic evidence and lying to representatives of the Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission and FBI. The SEC filed a separate civil lawsuit on Wednesday. 

Prosecutors said the Adanis and another executive and former CEO of Adani Green Energy Vneet Jaain, raised more than $3 billion in loans and bonds by hiding their corruption from lenders and investors.

According to the indictment, some conspirators referred privately to Gautam Adani with the code names “Numero uno” and “the big man”, while Sagar Adani allegedly used his cell phone to track specifics about the bribes.

The Allegations:

The case revolves around an agreement between Adani Green Energy Ltd. and another firm to sell 12 gigawatts of solar power to the Indian government. The US indictment accuses them falsifying records for Wall Street investors to pour in several billion dollars into the project over the last five years while in India, it was paying or planning to pay $265 million in bribes to government officials to help secure contracts.

Meanwhile, in another civil action, the US Securities and Exchange Commission accused Adani and two co-defendants of violating antifraud provisions of US securities laws. The regulator is seeking monetary penalties and other sanctions.

Sanjay Wadhwa, acting director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division, told AP that 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”.