The Adani Bribery Investigation: What's Really Going On?

On November 20th, 2024, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York unsealed a five-count criminal indictment against Gautama Donnie.

Gautam Adani, one of the world's richest people, has been indicted in the US over an alleged multi-billion dollar fraud scheme.

Also, his nephew, Sagar Adani, who was a 30-year-old executive director on the board of Adani Green Energy.

And they also named a company executive named Vineet Jain.

So again, hammer this home.

These are not civil charges.

This is not just about money.

These are criminal charges.

Five additional defendants were named here as well.

There was Ranjit Gupta and Rupesh Agarwal, former executives at a solar company called Azure Power Global.

And there were three individuals, this is really interesting here, connected to a major Canadian pension fund.

Forgive my French here.

Cassez des dépôts et placement du Québec.

For those that have been to Quebec, they speak French and not part of Canada.

French Canada, of course.

Which this pension fund had invested in the underlying deal with Adani.

And these three people with this fund that were named are Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal, and Deepak Malhotra.

not to be confused with Deepak Chopra.

That detail alone, we should pause on this.

You need to understand this is not being framed as one rogue Indian conglomerate that's just acting alone.

The prosecutors here were alleging that professionals that were connected to a respected North American institutional investor, right? This is a pension fund.

These are retirees trusting these people with their money.

They had knowingly participated in or let's just say at a bare minimum, looked the other way from this alleged scheme, which is part of what gave this indictment global weight.

This is beyond India's borders.

This is a global case that people are following.