US accuses billionaire Gautam Adani of fraud over solar power projectExBulletin

Adani Group Indian Chairman Gautam Adani addresses the vibrant Gujarat Global Summit in Gandhinagar, India on January 10, 2024. Ajit Solanki/AP .

switch captionAjit Solanki/AP

NEW YORK An Indian businessman, one of the world's richest people, has been indicted in the United States for misleading investors by concealing that his company's massive solar power project on the sub- continent was facilitated by an alleged corruption scheme.

Gautam Adani, 62, was charged in an indictment unsealed Wednesday with securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. The case concerns a lucrative deal between Adani Green Energy Ltd. and another company to sell 12 gigawatts of solar power to the Indian government, enough to light millions of homes and businesses.

The indictment presents Adani and his co-defendants as playing both sides of the coin.

He accuses them of presenting it as rosy and honest in the eyes of Wall Street investors who have invested several billion dollars in the project over the past five years while in India they were paying or planned to pay around $265 million in bribes to government officials. to help secure billions of dollars in contracts and financing.

Adani and his co-defendants sought “to obtain and finance massive government energy contracts through corruption and fraud at the expense of American investors,” said Assistant Attorney General Lisa Miller.

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.”

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

Both cases were filed in Brooklyn federal court.

Adani's co-defendants include his nephew Sagar Adani, executive director of Adani Green Energy's board, and Vneet Jaain, who served as the company's chief executive from 2020 to 2023 and remains chief executive of its board of directors. administration.

Online court records do not list an attorney able to 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 attorneys 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 claiming “not only that Adani Green had a strong of anti-corruption compliance, but also that the company's senior management had not and would not pay or promise to pay bribes.

Adani is a powerful player in the world's most populous country. He built his fortune in the coal sector in the 1990s. The Adani group has grown and become involved in many aspects of Indian life, from manufacturing defense equipment to building roads in through the sale of cooking oil.

In recent years, the Adani Group has made great strides in the field of renewable energy, adopting a philosophy of sustainable growth reflected in its slogan: “Growth with Goodness”.

The company has a clean energy portfolio of more than 20 gigawatts, including one of the world's largest solar power plants located in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. The Adani Group has declared its aim to become the country's largest player in the field by 2030. In 2022, Gautam Adani said the company will invest $70 billion in clean energy projects by 2032 .

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

The company in question is known as a short seller, a Wall Street term for traders who essentially bet on the price of certain stocks falling, and it had made such investments in connection with the Adani Group. As a result, the company's shares plunged and fell again in August when Hindenburg Research came forward with new corruption allegations.

Jaain told The Associated Press last year that Hindenburg's allegations had little impact on his current projects, including construction of a 20-gigawatt solar and wind power project in the village from Khavda, in northwest India.

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

High prices from Adani Green and the other company have discouraged India's state-owned electricity distributors, which buy electricity from the national government and supply it to homes and businesses. But the companies needed the deals to make the project profitable and keep revenues high, so they offered bribes to make them happen, prosecutors said.

After the defendants began promising bribes to government officials, in 2021 and 2022, electricity distributors in five Indian states or regions entered into deals to buy their power, prosecutors said. Adani's company released a statement calling its deals the “largest” power purchase agreement in the world.

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 allowed them to secure billions of dollars in financing for the project on terms that “did not take into account the true risk” involved, prosecutors said.

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