Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani charged in US over massive bribery scheme

Billionaire Indian industrialist Gautam Adani has been charged with paying hundreds of millions of dollars of bribes and hiding the payments from investors, US prosecutors said on Wednesday.

With a business empire spanning coal, airports, cement and media, the chairman of Adani Group has been rocked in recent years by corporate fraud allegations and a stock crash.

The close acolyte of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a fellow Gujarat native, is alleged to have agreed to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials for lucrative solar energy supply contracts.

The deals were projected to generate more than $2 billion in profits after tax, over roughly 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 meticulously tracked bribe payments, using his phone to log the bungs offered to officials.

"This indictment alleges schemes to pay over $250 million in bribes to Indian government officials, to lie to investors and banks to raise billions of dollars, and to obstruct justice," said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lisa Miller.

'Fear of reprisal'

"Gautam Adani and seven other business executives allegedly bribed the Indian government to finance lucrative contracts designed to benefit their businesses... while still other defendants allegedly attempted to conceal the bribery conspiracy by obstructing the government's investigation," said the FBI's James Dennehy.

A self-described introvert, Adani keeps a low profile and rarely speaks to the media, often sending lieutenants to front corporate events.

Adani was born in Ahmedabad, Gujarat state, to a middle-class family but dropped out of school at 16 and moved to the financial capital Mumbai to find work in the city's lucrative gem trade.

After a short stint in his brother's plastics business, he launched the flagship family conglomerate that bears his name in 1988 by branching out into 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 it was "deeply over-leveraged."

In 2023 a bombshell report from US investment firm Hindenburg Research claimed the conglomerate had engaged in a "brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades."

Hindenburg said a pattern of "government leniency towards the group" stretching back decades had left investors, journalists, citizens and politicians unwilling to challenge its conduct "for fear of reprisal."