(AFP) – US prosecutors are set to drop charges against billionaire Indian industrialist Gautam Adani, who was accused of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes and hiding the payments, The New York Times reported Thursday. 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.
A close acolyte of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a fellow native of Gujarat state, he was alleged in November 2024 to have agreed to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials for lucrative solar energy supply contracts. The Times said the move to abandon the charges, brought under US President Joe Biden’s administration, came after Adani hired new lawyers 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 if prosecutors dropped the charges, Mr. Adani would be willing to invest $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.
Adani was born in Ahmedabad, Gujarat state, to a middle-class family but dropped out of school at 16 and moved to 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.
The Department of Justice did not respond to an AFP call for comment.
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