Billionaire Gautam Adani charged in New York with massive fraud, bribery

Gautam Adani, chair of India’s Adani Group and one of the world’s richest people, was indicted in New York with others for an alleged multi-billion-dollar fraud scheme, authorities said Wednesday.

Adani and seven other defendants are accused of agreeing to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain “lucrative solar energy supply contracts with the Indian government,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn said.

Those contracts were projected to generate more than $2 billion in post-tax profits over two decades.

Adani, who is the second richest person in Asia, allegedly met in person with an Indian government official on several occasions as part of the bribery scheme, which spanned 2020 to 2024, prosecutors said.

Adani and two other defendants, his nephew Sagar Adani and Vneet Jaain, who are executives of Adani Green Energy Limited, are also accused of conspiracies related to allegedly misleading U.S. and international investors about their company’s compliance with anti-bribery and corruption practices as they sought to raise capital from those investors.

Adani Green Energy raised more than $2 billion from lender groups comprised of American investors and international lenders to fund the Indian government energy supply contracts, and more than $1 billion in two bond offerings underwritten by international financial institutions that were marketed and sold in the United States and elsewhere, prosecutors said.

The five-count indictment unsealed Wednesday also charged Ranjit Gupta and Rupash Agarwal, who are former executives in the renewable-energy company Azure Power, and three former employees of the Canadian institutional investor Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec — Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal and Deepak Malhotra — with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection with the bribery scheme by Adani.

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

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