After Hindenburg Research's January report rattled the Adani Group's shares for many months, the conglomerate's shares are yet again bleeding. But this time, the reason is accusations by 93-year-old billionaire George Soros's?organization.
All Adani Group shares declined this morning after potentially controversial owners of its stock were identified in a new investigation,?dealing the Indian conglomerate a fresh blow after a Hindenburg?Research report alleged the group engaged in corporate fraud and stock price manipulation.
As of this morning, Adani Enterprises and Adani Power are down around 2.5%, Adani Ports is down 2.1%, Adani Wilmar is down 1.6%, Adani Total Gas is down 1.9%, Adani Green Energy is down nearly 5%, and Adani Transmission is down 2.5% (at the time of writing this report).
About a week after George Soros' organisation warned of 'exposing'?multiple Indian companies soon, Adani Group has become its first target.
Documents obtained by staff at?George Soros' Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project show that Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli from the United Arab Emirates and Chang Chung-Ling from Taiwan spent years trading hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Adani Group stock, as the organisation alleged in a highly anticipated report.
The two men have had longtime business ties to the Adani family and have served as directors and shareholders in Adani Group companies, the OCCRP said on its website, along with firms associated with Vinod Adani, who is the brother of the conglomerate’s billionaire founder, Gautam Adani, as per a Bloomberg report.
The documents were corroborated by people with direct knowledge of the Adani Group’s businesses and public records from multiple countries, the OCCRP said,?and show how hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in publicly traded Adani stock through opaque investment funds based in Mauritius. The report alleged that?millions of dollars?were invested in some publicly traded stocks of India's Adani Group via "opaque" Mauritius funds that obscured the involvement of alleged business partners of the Adani family.
"The documents show that, through the Mauritius funds, they spent years buying and selling Adani stock through offshore structures that obscured their involvement—and made considerable profits in the process," the OCCRP found. "They also show that the management company in charge of their investments paid a Vinod Adani company to advise them on their investments."
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Just like it did in the Hindenburg?research report,?Adani Group denied the allegations this time as well.?
Adani Group said in a statement on Thursday that it rejected "these recycled allegations," adding that they were based on decade-old closed cases. “There is no relevance or foundation for these allegations on transfer of funds.”
The OCCRP investigation is yet another broadside against the ports-to-power conglomerate, which has been firefighting allegations of wide-ranging corporate malfeasance made at the start of the year. The Hindenburg report prompted a probe by Indian regulators and wiped out more than $150 billion in market value from Adani’s listed companies at one point.
Adani Group has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, but the allegations have drawn wider scrutiny of corporate governance practices across India’s family-dominated business world. Now it remains to be seen how the Gautam Adani-led conglomerate tackles this fresh blow.??
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