Adani group used 'opaque' funds in stocks: Report

Sandeep Dikshit

New Delhi, August 31

The Adani group on Thursday battled accusations about the use of “opaque funds from tax havens in its publicly trading companies in order to shield the identity of its business partners”.

The allegations were made by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), said to be a global network of investigative journalists focused on exposing graft and funded, among others, by George Soros and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The charges came just two days after a preliminary probe by the Enforcement Directorate claimed that dozen companies, including foreign portfolio investors and foreign institutions, had taken up positions just two-three days before the first adverse report on the Adani group was published by Hindenburg Research on January 24. Some of these were taking short positions for the first time ever and were major beneficiaries from the crash in stock prices of Adani companies that followed the report’s publication.

The release of “Hindenburg 2.0”, however, has led to only ripples in the shares of Adani group companies as compared to the meltdown that occurred in January. Following the report’s release, the flagship Adani Enterprises fell by 3 per cent and other group companies slid by one to five per cent.

The OCCRP said the Adani Group routed investments in its publicly traded stocks through “opaque” Mauritius funds. OCCRP claimed these funds obscured the involvement of alleged Adani family business partners. It was indicating that these were ‘benami’ funds routed from India via tax havens into Adani group companies to inflate their stock prices. Soros had earlier spoken on the Hindenburg report and had questioned PM Narendra Modi’s ties with Gautam Adani.

The Adani Group did not think the report was “Hindenburg 2.0”. Rather it felt these were “recycled” allegations backed by interests associated with George Soros and a section of the foreign media to resuscitate the “meritless” Hindenburg report. The group also claimed that the OCCRP’s claims were based on investigations from a decade ago by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) with the matter resolved by the Supreme Court ruling in March 2023.