Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Indian billionaire Gautam Adani attend an inauguration ceremony after the Adani Group completed the purchase of Haifa Port earlier in January 2023, in Haifa port, Israel January 31, 2023
Written by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
There is nothing Gautam Adani will not do for money. In this sense, he is admirably dedicated to greed, so much so he has become its foremost caricature worthy of permanent enthronement. Mark this man’s name in the scriptures of eternity: There was nothing he did not do for the filthy lucre.
For the unfamiliar reader, the $218 billion Adani imperium, one specialising in transport, infrastructure, and mining, is vast, with far reaching feelers, prongs and tentacles that have made their mark in a number of countries. Along the way, Adani’s companies have made quite a name for themselves. Employment laws have been breached and treated with disdain. Broader human rights abuses have featured. Governments and regulators have been lied to. No environment is ecologically safe from the company’s activities, despite their assertions to the contrary.
The gallivanting, amoral CEO has also made quite a habit of cultivating politicians across the globe. These representatives, weaklings as they are, have shown themselves amenable to changing their minds in the face of Adani’s overtures.
Despite all their efforts, GA and key members of the group, of which 8 hail from his family, have not been immune from criticism. A number of reports abound from non-government organisations and activists documenting a most predatory record. But the evaluation from the short seller Hindenburg Research, whose findings were published last month, approached the conduct of the conglomerate Adani Group a bit differently.
The central claim of the US investment firm is that the group has “engaged in a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades.” Having spoken to dozens of individuals, including former senior executives, and conducting a review of thousands of documents and visiting a number of sites across a half-dozen countries, the picture that emerges is even uglier than first thought.
For one, the image of financial security and reliable solvency comes across as a fiction. In addition to grossly inflated valuations, the Adani companies have taken on substantial debt. Shares of inflated stock have been pledged in order to secure loans.
A sense of the false accounting picture given by Adani’s accounts can be gathered from the practices of Gautam Adani’s younger brother, Rajesh, who was accused by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) for being a key figure in a diamond import/export trading scheme in 2004-2005. Rajesh had used a number of offshore shell companies to generate artificial turnover. Gautam’s brother-in-law, Samir Vota, was also in on the scheme, making a number of false statements to the regulators.
The saga of corrupt behaviour continues through the activities of Vinod Adani, Gautam’s older brother. This most shady of figures plays a key role in managing dozens of shell entities that serve the functions of stock manipulation and money laundering. The latter part is achieved through using money from Adani’s private companies to bloat the balance sheets of the listed companies.
Adani’s response to the claims, one running into 413 mostly irrelevant pages, was to accuse the US firm of being in “flagrant breach of applicable securities and foreign exchange laws”, conduct becoming the “Madoffs of Manhattan”. A nationalist narrative was also injected into the rebuttal: to attack the Adani Group was nothing less than attacking Indian success itself.
Hindenburg Research’s counter to such bluster was chastening. India, “a vibrant democracy and an emerging superpower with an exciting future”, was being “held back by the Adani Group, which has draped itself in the Indian flag while systematically looting the nation.”
Since January 24, the date chosen by Hindenburg Research to release its findings, Gautam Adani’s unnaturally inflated personal wealth has been pared back. From being the third richest man, he is now out of the top 20. Within days, the conglomerate’s market value was wiped to the striking sum of $113.6 billion. The company has promised to prepay loans with $1.1 billion and call off its secondary share sale. The collateral used by the companies to secure funds has also suffered a fall in value.
Despite the rich number of allegations directed at Gautam, the family and his associates, another country and its government have fallen under the group’s spell. On January 31, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Adani shook hands to formally confirm the $1.18 billion sale of the port of Haifa that had been agreed upon earlier in the month. The Indian billionaire was wistfully nostalgic on the occasion, noting that Indian troops had “led, in 1918, one of the greatest cavalry charges in military history” in Haifa.
Netanyahu hopes to leverage investments made in the Haifa project to create a trade route linking the Mediterranean and the Gulf, thereby bypassing the Suez Canal. In the words of the overly confident Israeli Prime Minister, Haifa would “become the entry point and exit point for a vast number of goods that will reach the Mediterranean and Europe directly, without having to go around the Arabian peninsula.”
To do so, the Abraham Accords are being touted as the economic centrepiece, enabling rail links to be established in Saudi Arabia, through Jordan and ultimately to Haifa port itself. But Netanyahu, himself no creature to accusations of corruption, is facing a figure and business partner in freefall.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Wow. Another one of Author’s ideological masterpieces. He has shallow grasp of the matter at hand, and starts with filling in ‘unfamiliar readers’. While comment section is not adequate to educate him on the issue. He clearly has failed in even reading the index of rebuttal by the businessman/company in question. What his article says can be summed up like this- Short selling firm Hinderberg and its american sponsors speak gospel, timed at Adani’s FPO. While as a capitalist, Adani’s replies are not worthy of being even read, much less explained. Never mind. The Author has an ideological bias, clearly seen from his title of his Articles, related to the region. For the ‘Unfamiliar readers’ – Read IndoPhobia & Hinduphobia. Its quite deep rooted. Its incurable with a thick brain and the logic he serves.
Is being against cronyism “Hinduphobia”?
Is being against money anti-semitism? Who asked you to assume cronyism? You lack basic knowledge of, how easy it is to prosecute anyone, by anyone in Indian Courts etc. don’t assume it works like other countries. Grow up. These kind of one liners do not even work on kids now. I underlined how and where his article lacks. No one will directly say I hate Hindus or Indians upfront. Not even Pakistanis say so. They pretend to aim somewhere, and shoot somewhere else.
No one is hating Hindus here. Are you delusional?
Probably south front concentrate on dying Russian soldiers and russian collapse rather than India?🥱