Adani in the Carousel of Accusations: A Tightrope Walk Between Power and Corruption

The billionaire entrepreneur Gautam Adani, founder and chairman of the Adani Group, is at the center of a massive alleged corruption scandal involving his subsidiaries Adani Green and Azure Power. The latter is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. According to a criminal case unsealed in New York, Adani, 62, his nephew Sagar Adani, 30, and other executives are accused of offering over $250 million in bribes in a massively orchestrated scheme. This money was intended to secure billion-dollar contracts in the electricity and energy sector. The allegedly four-year-long scheme, which spanned multiple continents, included meetings with officials to negotiate bribes and energy contracts—purportedly with the direct involvement of Gautam Adani himself. Authorities accuse the participants of securing more than $2 billion in loans and bonds under false pretenses. Lisa H. Miller, Deputy Attorney General, stated that the charges included bribery, lying to investors and banks, and obstructing justice to obtain government energy contracts through corruption and fraud. All this takes place against the backdrop of Adani's rapid ascent, who was once considered the third richest person in the world, behind Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. In 1998, he founded the Adani Group as a trading company, which later developed into a massive conglomerate, including airports, seaports, and railways in the energy distribution sector. Along with his brother Rajesh, Sagar Adani's father, he founded Adani Green Energy in 2015 to boost the renewable energy business. The market value of the Adani Group is currently estimated at over $200 billion. Investigators claim the perpetrators attempted to cover their tracks with code names. Gautam Adani was referred to as "SAG," "Mr. A," "Number One," and "The Big One," for example. Other participants, like Adani Green's CEO Vneet S. Jaain, were given code names. Moreover, former executives of an unnamed American company, Ranjit Gupta and Rupesh Agarwal, have also been charged. According to authorities, Sagar Adani monitored the bribery offers to government officials via his mobile phone and maintained the so-called "bribery notes." These documented the state or region, the bribes paid to government officials, and the solar capacity the respective state would acquire in return. The SEC additionally alleged that Sagar Adani emphasized the need to "motivate" Indian officials and states to sign contracts.