Adani CFO says US wages linked to only one employment contract

The U.S. bribery charge against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani is linked to a contract for Adani Green Energy, which accounts for about 10 percent of his business, and no other firms in the conglomerate have been accused of wrongdoing, the group’s CFO said on Saturday.

On Wednesday, Gautam Adani, one of the world’s richest men, and seven others were indicted by U.S. prosecutors on fraud charges for their alleged roles in a $265 million scheme to bribe Indian officials to secure energy supply deals.

Adani, however, denied all the allegations, calling them “baseless”.

Jugeshinder Singh, the group’s CFO, sought to defend the allegations on Saturday, saying none of Adani’s 11 public companies were “subject to the claim” or “accused of any wrongdoing in the said legal filing”.

Singh said in

The charges by U.S. prosecutors represent the biggest setback for India’s $143 billion Adani Group, which was hurt last year by Hindenburg Research’s allegations of improper use of offshore tax havens; the company denied this.

The indictment in the US has already had a significant impact on business.

The group’s shares have fallen sharply, some global banks are considering temporarily halting new loans to Adani, and Kenya canceled two deals with Adani worth more than $2.5 billion.

Adani, which has many other global projects, is also accused of misleading US investors about Adani Green’s compliance with anti-bribery principles and laws.

Singh said on Saturday that they became aware of the “specificity” of the US accusations only two days ago.

“We knew something was wrong,” he said, adding that the company had announced a $750 million bond offering to investors in 2024, of which about $175 million had been raised from financial institutions in the United States.

But the U.S. indictment states that the bond offer “contained, among other things, false and misleading assurances about the ‘corporate governance’ of the Indian Energy Company (Adani Green) and touted ‘maintenance of transparency and compliance in all respects.'”

The accusations also highlight Sagar Adani, an Adani Green executive and a millennial at the company, who has been tracking allegations of hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian officials on his mobile phone.

Singh said the group would comment further once it gets regulatory approval as the matter is before the courts.