Billionaire Indian industrialist Gautam Adani has been accused of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes and concealing the payments from investors. US Prosecutors said this on Wednesday.
With a business empire that includes coal, airports, cement and media, the Adani Group chairman has been rocked by corporate takeovers in recent years. fraud accusations and a stock market crash.
The Hindu nationalist Prime Minister’s close acolyte Narendra Modia fellow resident of Gujarat, allegedly agreed to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials for lucrative activities. solar energy supply contracts.
The deals were expected to generate more than $2 billion in after-tax profits over about 20 years.
None of the multiple defendants in the case, including Adani, are in custody, the prosecutor’s office told AFP.
Prosecutors say one of Adani’s alleged accomplices kept meticulous records of the bribes, using his phone to log the stops offered to officials.
“This indictment alleges schemes to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian government officials, lie to investors and banks to obtain billions of dollars, and to obstruct justice,” said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lisa Miller.
‘Fear of reprisals’
“Gautam Adani and seven other businessmen are alleged to have bribed the Indian government to finance lucrative contracts that benefited their companies… while other defendants are alleged to have attempted to conceal the bribery conspiracy by obstructing the government’s investigation,” it said. James Dennehy of the FBI.
Adani calls himself an introvert, keeps a low profile and rarely speaks to the media, often sending lieutenants to company events.
Adani was born in Ahmedabad, Gujarat state, to a middle-class family, but dropped out of school at the age of 16 and moved to the financial capital Mumbai to find work in the city’s lucrative gem trade.
After a brief stint in his brother’s plastics business, he launched the flagship family conglomerate that bears his name in 1988 by focusing on the export trade.
His big break came seven years later with a contract to build and operate a commercial shipping port in Gujarat.
Adani Group’s rapid expansion into capital-intensive businesses previously raised alarms, with Fitch subsidiary and market researcher CreditSights warning in 2022 that it was “very over-indebted”.
In 2023, a bombshell report from US investment firm Hindenburg Research alleged that the conglomerate had engaged in a “shameful stock manipulation and accounting fraud” over decades.
Hindenburg said a pattern of “government leniency toward the group” that stretched back decades had left investors, journalists, citizens and politicians unwilling to challenge its behavior “for fear of reprisal.”
(AFP)
Leave a Reply