Adani Group Shares Dip Following Allegations of Opaque Investments

Shares of the Adani Group fell on Thursday after a report from the investigative reporting platform OCCRP claimed that partners of the promoter family of billionaire Gautam Adani invested hundreds of millions of dollars through Mauritius-based "opaque" investment funds in publicly traded group stocks.

The corporation vigorously refuted the accusations, however.

Adani Green Energy's stock, which has a market value of Rs 1.47 lakh crore, fell 4.43 percent to Rs 927.65 a share on the BSE.

On the stock exchange, the shares of Adani Power, the company's flagship company, plummeted 3.82 percent to Rs 315.85, Adani Enterprises lost 3.56 percent to Rs 2,424 and Adani Energy Solutions sank 3.18 percent to Rs 814.95.

Adani Total Gas lost 2.74 percent to Rs 634.60, Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone (APSEZ) fell 2.75 percent to Rs 796.50, NDTV dropped 2.69 percent to Rs 213.30, and Adani Wilmar slid 1.83 percent to Rs 362.20 a piece on the BSE.

Ambuja Cements' stock dropped 2.84 percent to Rs 431.60, while ACC's shares lost 3.15 percent to Rs 1,937.10.

The 30-share BSE Sensex was down 38.32 points, or 0.06 percent, at 65,048.93 points during the morning session.

The new accusations come months after a US short seller wiped away close to USD 150 billion in value of Adani group stocks with claims of accounting fraud, stock price manipulation, and improper use of tax havens by the ports-to-energy conglomerate run by billionaire Gautam Adani. The new allegations are made by a group funded by people like George Soros and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. All charges relating to the Hindenburg have been refuted by Adani Group.

OCCRP (Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) said that its research discovered at least two instances when the "mysterious" investors acquired and sold Adani shares using such offshore companies, citing scrutiny of data from many tax havens and internal Adani Group correspondence.

The two men, Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli and Chang Chung-Ling, who OCCRP claimed have close business ties to the Adani family and have held director and shareholder positions in Group companies as well as businesses connected to Vinod Adani, the elder brother of Gautam Adani, "spent years buying and selling Adani stock through offshore structures that obscured their involvement - and made substantial profits in the process." The claims were supported by the paperwork, which "show that the management company in charge of their investments paid a Vinod Adani company to advise them in their investment."

Adani vehemently denied what it referred to as "recycled allegations" in a statement, calling them "yet another concerted attempt by Soros-funded interests supported by a section of the foreign media to revive the meritless Hindenburg report."

"These charges are based on closed cases that the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) investigated ten years ago when it looked into claims of excessive invoicing, international financial transfers, related party transactions, and investments made via FPIs. The absence of an overvaluation and the transactions' compliance with the law were both affirmed by an independent adjudicating body and an appeal panel. When the Supreme Court of India decided in our favor, the case was finally resolved in March 2023. Since there was no overvaluation, it is obvious that these charges about the transfer of monies have no significance or basis.