Billionaire Gautam Adani and several executives of his company, Indian conglomerate Adani Group, have been indicted over an alleged scheme to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials in exchange for contracts for a 12-gigawatt solar project.
The indictmentUnveiled Wednesday in federal court in Brooklyn, it accuses Adani, his cousin Sagar Adani and Vneet Jaain of conspiring to commit securities and wire fraud and substantial securities fraud as part of an effort to raise money in the U.S. to build in India “one of the world’s largest solar projects,” the Justice Department said.
“The defendants orchestrated an elaborate scheme to bribe Indian government officials to secure contracts worth billions of dollars,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement.
Also named in the indictment were Ranjit Gupta and Rupesh Agarwal, former executives of Azure Power, and Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal and Deepak Malhotra, former employees of Canadian institutional investor Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec.
In addition to the Justice Department’s indictment, the SEC also charged Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani and Cabanes, also a former board member of Azure Power Global, for their participation in the bribery scheme and for violating federal anti-fraud laws by raising $175 million from US investors.
The Adanis allegedly told investors that Adani Green Bonds had a “robust anti-bribery program” and that the company “would not pay or promise to pay bribes,” said Sanjay Wadhwa, acting director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. said in a statement.
The Adani Group was the focus of a Hindenburg Research Survey published in 2023, which alleged that the conglomerate committed “a vast, fragrant fraud in broad daylight” and that it hid and laundered money through a series of shell companies set up in Cyprus, the UAE and Singapore, among others.
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