NEW DELHI: Indian billionaire industrialist Gautam Adani has agreed to pay a multi-million-dollar settlement in a US civil court case linked to corruption without admitting guilt, his company said on Friday (May 15).
The November 2024 indictment in New York accused the industrialist and multiple subordinates of deliberately misleading international investors as part of a vast bribery scheme.
Adani was accused of having participated in an estimated US$250 million scheme to bribe Indian officials for lucrative solar energy supply contracts.
Adani, along with his nephew Sagar Adani, agreed to the “payment of a civil penalty” totalling US$18 million, while noting that it came “without admitting or denying the allegations made in the civil complaint”, a letter from Adani Green Energy to the Mumbai stock exchange read.
The penalty payment comes as US prosecutors are reported to be set to drop charges against Adani, The New York Times reported on Thursday.
The Adani letter, which noted that the final judgement of the US court is still awaited, stressed that the “company is not a party to this proceeding, and no charges have been brought against it”.
The New York Times said the move to abandon the charges, brought under former US President Joe Biden’s administration, came after Adani hired a new legal team led by Robert Giuffra, one of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyers.
The Times reported that at a meeting between defense and prosecution at the Department of Justice in April, Giuffra presented slides including one that said that if prosecutors dropped the charges, Adani would be willing to invest US$10 billion in the American economy and create 15,000 jobs.
Prosecutors previously detailed how one of Adani’s alleged accomplices meticulously tracked payments, using his phone to log the bribes offered to officials.
With a business empire spanning coal, airports, cement and media, the chairman of Adani Group has been rocked in recent years by corporate fraud allegations and a stock crash.
Adani, a close ally of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was born in Ahmedabad in Gujarat state to a middle-class family but dropped out of school at 16.
He moved to India’s financial capital, Mumbai, to find work in the city’s lucrative gem trade.
After a short stint in his brother’s plastics business, he launched the flagship family conglomerate that bears his name in 1988 by branching out into the export trade.
His big break came seven years later with a contract to build and operate a commercial shipping port in Gujarat.