NEW DELHI: The Adani Group has reacted strongly to the well-known US activist investor Hindenburg Research alleging “brazen accounting fraud, stock manipulation and money laundering” taking place over decades with the help of “enablers in government and a cottage industry of international companies that facilitate these activities”.
The $218-billion Adani Group’s shares lost $12 billion in market value after Hindenburg Research said it was shorting the stocks owned by Asia’s richest person.
The Adani Group’s Chief Financial Officer Jugeshinder Singh dismissed the report as a “malicious combination of selective misinformation and stale, baseless and discredited allegations that have been tested and rejected by India’s highest courts’’.
Singh also questioned the timing of the report which was prepared without any attempt to contact the Group. “The timing of the report’s publication clearly betrays a brazen, mala fide intention to undermine the Adani Group’s reputation with the principal objective of damaging the upcoming follow-on public offering (FPO) from Adani Enterprises, the biggest FPO ever in India,” he said. The FPO will open on January 27 and close on January 31.
Hindenburg said a two-year probe has shown that accounts of Adani companies with billions in turnover were audited by a hole-in-the-wall firm’s accountants who were “fresh out of school” and that Gautam Adani’s younger brother had consorted with financial fugitive Ketan Parekh and his accountant, who is also absconding.
Gautam Adani has added over $100 billion in the past three years “largely through stock price appreciation in seven key listed companies, which have spiked an average of 819%,” said the report.
Gautam Adani’s younger brother, Rajesh Adani, was accused by the DRI of involvement in a diamond trading scheme over a decade ago and elder brother Vinod Adani along with close associate manages at least 38 offshore shell entities whose only signs of operation is moving billions of dollars into Adani’s publicly listed and private entities, said the report. Another firm, Monterosa Investment, controls five funds that collectively hold over Rs 36,000 crore in Adani companies.