Billionaire Gautam Adani and several executives at his company, the 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 to a 12 gigawatt solar power project.
The indictment, unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Brooklyn, charges Adani, his nephew Sagar Adani, and Vneet Jaain with conspiracies to commit securities and wire fraud and substantive 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 energy projects,” the Department of Justice 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.
Alongside the Department of Justice indictment, the SEC also charged Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani, and Cabanes, also a former board member for Azure Power Global, for their participation in the bribery scheme and for violating federal antifraud laws in raising $175 million from U.S. investors.
The Adanis allegedly told investors that Adani Green bonds had a “robust anti-bribery compliance program” and the company “would not pay or promise to pay bribes,” 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 investigation published in 2023, which alleged the conglomerate operated “a large, fragrant fraud in broad daylight,” and that it hid and laundered money through a series of shell companies set up in countries including Cyprus, the UAE, and Singapore.