US charges billionaire Gautam Adani with defrauding investors, hiding plan to bribe Indian officials

NEW YORK (AP) — An Indian businessman who is one of the world’s richest people has been indicted in the U.S. on charges he duped investors in a massive solar energy project in his home country by concealing that it was facilitated by alleged bribery.

Gautam Adani, 62, was charged in an indictment unsealed Wednesday with securities fraud and conspiring to commit securities and wire fraud.

He is accused of defrauding investors who poured several billion dollars into the project by failing to tell them about more than $250 million in bribes paid to Indian officials to secure lucrative solar energy supply contracts.

Several other people connected to Adani, his businesses and the project were also charged.

Gautam Adani is a power player in the world’s most populous nation. He built his fortune in the coal business coal in the 1990s. His Adani Group grew to involve many aspects of Indian life, from making defense equipment to building roads to selling cooking oil.

In recent years, Adani has made big moves into renewable energy.

Last year, a U.S.-based financial research firm accused Adani his company of “brazen stock manipulation” and “accounting fraud.” The Adani Group called the claims “a malicious combination of selective misinformation and stale, baseless and discredited allegations.”

The firm in question is known as a short-seller, a Wall Street term for traders that essentially bet on the prices of certain stocks to fall, and it had made such investments in relation to the Adani Group.