NEW DELHI: Indian billionaire Gautam Adani has been indicted for fraud by US prosecutors and arrest warrants issued for him and his nephew for their alleged roles in a $265 million scheme to bribe Indian officials to secure power-supply deals. News of the charges wiped billions of dollars on Thursday from the market value of companies within Adani Group, and Adani Green Energy, the company at the centre of the allegations, cancelled a $600 million US bond sale.

Adani Group said in a statement that the allegations made by US federal prosecutors and in a parallel US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) civil case were “baseless and denied”, adding that it would seek “all possible legal recourse”. In the first major business fallout of the indictment, Kenyan President William Ruto said on Thursday he had ordered the cancellation of a procurement process expected to hand control of the country’s main airport to Adani Group following the indictment of the company’s founder in the United States. The crisis is the second in two years to hit the ports-to-power conglomerate founded by Adani, 62, one of the world’s richest people. In January 2023, short-seller Hindenburg Research issued a report that accused it of using offshore tax havens improperly, which Adani Group denied. US authorities said on Wednesday that eight people, including Adani and his nephew Sagar, had agreed to pay about $265 million in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain contracts expected to yield $2 billion of profit over 20 years, and to develop India’s largest solar power plant project.

Sagar Adani is an executive director at Adani Green Energy and currently oversees its “strategic and financial matters”.

They also said the Adanis and Adani Green Energy’s former CEO Vneet Jaain had raised more than $3 billion in loans and bonds by hiding their corruption from lenders and investors.

Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani and Jaain did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani and Jaain were charged with securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy, and the Adanis were also charged in a civil case by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. “Gautam and Sagar Adani were engaged in the bribery scheme during a September 2021 note offering by Adani Green that raised $750 million, including approximately $175 million from US investors,” the SEC said in a press statement adding that a company central to the scheme, Azure Power, used to trade on the New York Stock Exchange. —Reuters