For years, India’s Adani Group, an Indian conglomerate and the world’s largest private developer of coal plants, faced repeated allegations of corruption, money laundering, and theft of taxpayer funds. Those claims tended to be of local origin, and they triggered low-level investigations that usually went away. Meanwhile, Gautam Adani, 60, continued to amass his wealth, becoming critical to India’s infrastructural expansion under powerful Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Known as “Modi’s Rockefeller,” Adani is now Asia’s wealthiest man.
US probe leads to scandal. Now, Adani’s family-run energy and transport empire has been slammed with a US-based investigation by Hindenburg Research. The New York-based financial forensics investigator has cited evidence of suspected money laundering, stock manipulation, and tax fraud, causing Adani Group’s market value to tumble. Crucially, the report also raises questions about Adani’s proximity to his friend and ally, Modi.
Starting off with diamonds and commodities, Adani is now the coal king of India. Despite protests and regulations against the use of dirty fossil fuel, the first-generation entrepreneur has also expanded into defense, media, and cement, but much of his money has come from energy and infrastructure contracts, many of them tendered during the Modi era. While the relationship between the two men has been under scrutiny for years, the widely cited Hindenburg investigation doesn’t just detail the extent of Adani’s misdoings, but it also claims he couldn’t have gotten so far without the government stonewalling regulators and supporting his expansion.
Modi’s been silent about his ties to Adani, but he has reportedly nurtured a connection with him since the 1990s. Before Modi was PM, he was the chief minister of Gujarat, the same state where Adani got his start and where one of Modi’s major gifts to him was land at a throwaway price, which essentially became the launchpad for Adani’s biggest power moves.
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