From the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, August 31:
Two men who secretly invested in the massive conglomerate turn out to have close ties to its majority owners, the Adani family, raising questions about violations of Indian law.
Key Findings
- Neither India’s stock market regulator nor a high-level expert committee has been able to prove what many suspect: that some foreign owners of publicly listed Adani Group stock are, in fact, fronts for its majority owners.
- Fresh allegations aired this January by American short sellers rocked the conglomerate, but offshore secrecy has made tracing the transactions difficult. Official investigators “hit a wall,” in the words of one report.
- Now, new documents obtained by reporters reveal two men who spent years trading hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Adani Group stock: Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli and Chang Chung-Ling.
- Both have close ties to the Adani family, including appearing as directors and shareholders in affiliated companies.
- Records show that the investment funds they used to trade in Adani Group stock received instructions from a company controlled by a senior member of the Adani family.
It became one of the largest economic scandals in the history of modern India: The Adani Group, a massive conglomerate with interests in everything from airports to television stations, was accused of brazen stock manipulation.
The allegation, leveled this January by a New York-based short seller, caused Adani stock to plummet, triggered protests, and prompted an investigation by India’s Supreme Court.
But the expert committee convened by the court was unable to get to the bottom of the scandal, which has serious political implications because of the group’s widely perceived closeness to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and its central role in his plan for developing the country.
The essence of the allegations was that some of the Adani Group’s key “public” investors were in fact Adani insiders, a possible violation of Indian securities law. But none of the agencies contacted by the committee were able to identify those investors, since they were hidden behind secretive offshore structures.
Now, exclusive documents obtained by OCCRP and shared with The Guardian and Financial Times — including files from multiple tax havens, bank records, and internal Adani Group emails — shed light on that very matter.
These documents, which have been corroborated by people with direct knowledge of the Adani Group’s business and public records from multiple countries, show how hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in publicly traded Adani stock through opaque investment funds based in the island nation of Mauritius.
In at least two cases — representing Adani stock holdings that at one point reached $430 million — the mysterious investors turn out to have widely reported ties to the group’s majority shareholders, the Adani family....
....MUCH MORE
