Billionaire Gautam Adani charged with fraud, bribery in New York

Gautam Adani, chair of India’s Adani Group and one of the world’s richest people, was indicted with seven other men in New York federal court on charges related to a massive bribery and fraud scheme, authorities said Wednesday.

Adani and several other other defendants are accused in the indictment of having paid 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 billionaire and two executives in Adani Green Energy Limited, his nephew Sagar Adani and Vneet Jaain, are charged with misleading U.S. and international investors about their company’s compliance with antibribery and anticorruption practices as they raised more than $3 billion in capital to fund those energy contracts.

Both Adanis and Jaain are charged with securities fraud conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy and securities fraud.

The five-count indictment in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn also charged Ranjit Gupta and Rupesh Agarwal, who were former executives in the renewable energy company Azure Power Global, as well as three former employees of the Canadian institutional investor Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec: Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal and Deepak Malhotra.

Those defendants are accused of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection to the bribery scheme by Adani and the others at the energy company.

Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal, Malhotra and Rupesh Agarwal are also accused of conspiring to obstruct U.S. federal criminal and Securities and Exchange Commission investigations into the bribery scheme.

Although the alleged criminal activity at the center of the indictment occurred in India, the defendants are charged in Brooklyn federal court because of alleged actions that occurred in the Eastern District of New York in connection with the bribery scheme and capital-raise effort.

Those actions included alleged false statements of material facts or omissions from statements related to a bond issuance that raised capital for the solar energy contracts.

None of the defendants are in U.S. custody. All of the defendants, except for Cabanes, live in India. Cabanes is a resident of France and Australia, according to prosecutors.

The SEC filed civil complaints Wednesday against Gautam Adani and Sagar Adani, 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.