Moreover, India’s Securities and Exchange Board (SEBI) has repeatedly found the Adani Group innocent of the charges. These accusations were made by Hindenburg Research, a U.S.-based firm infamous for its short-selling strategy. Our original complaint on January 24, 2023 sparked this investigation. It did not find any evidence of accounting irregularities, stock manipulation, or non-disclosed transactions with offshore shell companies.
Hindenburg Research then published a 106-page brief that accused Adani Group of artificially inflating share prices through nefarious schemes. The firm is known for its short-selling, making money by betting against companies it thinks are overvalued or committing fraud. Those allegations unleashed a firestorm of critical examination of the Adani Group. Regulators and opposition parties have their eyes glued on the bank.
The opposition Congress party swiftly criticized Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for failing to take decisive action against Adani Group, suggesting political favoritism may play a role in the company’s operations. Sebi obviously didn’t do much of an investigation. Turned out they had not violated any regulatory standards and concluded that the trades at issue were not manipulative or fraudulent.
“Sebi has reaffirmed what we have always maintained, that the Hindenburg claims were baseless,” stated Gautam Adani, the chairman of Adani Group. It found no undisclosed transactions between Adani’s companies and related parties that should have been disclosed to investors.
New Delhi’s anti-corruption watchdog stepped in back in May. In other words, they found no evidence of any corruption or malfeasance that arose from the allegations raised by Hindenburg Research. This allowed the company to double down against the mounting concerns of investors and the general public.
Hindenburg then leveled extremely serious charges of financial malfeasance. He further accused former Sebi chief Madhabi Puri Buch, asserting that she had links to abroad funds deployed in the Adani Group. These claims spurred the political firestorm against the company. People started to doubt its alleged connections with the Modi government even further.
As the dust settles on these allegations, Nate Anderson, the founder of Hindenburg Research, announced plans to disband the firm after nearly eight years in operation. His goal, he told his blog’s readers, was to re-orient himself to spend more actual time with the people he cared about.
For all the consequences of Sebi’s findings, Gautam Adani’s reputation looks hard-won. Although he is under sustained fire from opposition politicians over his political connections and business dealings, he is still on the front. The issue has cast doubt on accountability and transparency in India’s burgeoning corporate world.