Shares of Adani Group companies suffered losses of up to 20% on Thursday morning after the conglomerate’s chairperson Gautam Adani was indicted in the United States for his alleged role in a multibillion-dollar bribery and fraud scheme.
At 11.40 am, the shares of the group’s flagship company Adani Enterprises fell by 20.61% on the Bombay Stock Exchange and was trading at Rs 2,238.95. Shares of Adani Energy Solutions too fell by 20% to Rs 697.70, while those of Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone fell by 16.26% to Rs 1,079.50.
Among other Adani Group companies, Adani Power was down by 11.03% and Adani Total Gas fell by 13.13% on the Bombay Stock Exchange as of 11.40 am.
Stock markets as a whole also suffered losses, with the benchmark BSE Sensex down by 0.63% at 77,099.13, and the NSE Nifty down by 0.74% at 23,344.55.
In the wake of indictments of Gautam Adani and his nephew Sagar Adani in the United States, the Adani Group cancelled its bond offering of $600 million, or Rs 5,066.5 crore, The Indian Express reported.
Bonds are loans from an investor to a borrower, usually a company or a government. Through a bond offering, a company issues bonds to raise money from investors, usually to finance certain projects or operations.
Adani Green Energy had planned to use funds raised through the bond offering to repay foreign-currency loans.
The case in which Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani and six others have been indicted pertains to the billionaire industrialist’s solar projects in India.
According to the United States Attorney’s office for the Eastern District, Gautam Adani and the others agreed to pay over $265 million, or nearly Rs 2,236 crore, in bribes to Indian government officials between 2020 and 2024 to obtain contracts expected to yield a profit of $2 billion, or nearly Rs 16,880 crore.
It added: “Adani and other defendants also defrauded investors by raising capital on the basis of false statements about bribery and corruption, while still other defendants allegedly attempted to conceal the bribery conspiracy by obstructing the government’s investigation.”
The other six persons named by the prosecutor are Vneet S Jaain, the CEO of Adani Green Energy, Ranjit Gupta, who was CEO of Azure Power Global between 2019 and 2022, Rupesh Agarwal, who worked with Azure Power between 2022 and 2023, and Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal, and Deepak Malhotra, all three of whom worked with a Canadian institutional investor.