Disguised as U.S. federal charges for “corruption” and “market rigging” against Gautam Adani, India’s most prominent businessman and a strong supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s development policies, the U.S. Department of Justice has launched all out “lawfare” against India, one of the founding members of the BRICS. The game-book is very similar to the one that was used by the DOJ in the 2014 “Car Wash” scandal in Brazil, another BRICS founder, to take down that country’s scientific and industrial infrastructure, including the leading construction company Odebrecht; to illegally depose President Dilma Rousseff; and to jail former President Lula da Silva on fabricated charges. Lula today is President of the country for the second time.
As Financial Times explained in a Nov. 24 article, Adani is Asia’s second-richest man and an “Indian billionaire who has built a powerful conglomerate stretching across mining, ports and renewable energy.” His group “has been seen as synonymous with India’s national infrastructure drive under Narendra Modi,” a Nov. 21 FT article reported.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have charged Adani and co-defendants with paying “more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials between 2020 and 2024, in a plan concealed from the US investors and banks from which they raised billions of dollars.”
FT quoted Kevin Davis, professor at New York University School of Law, about the “parallels with Brazilian construction conglomerate Odebrecht, which was involved in Brazil’s sprawling corruption investigation known as `Car Wash’.… In that case, the DOJ did not pursue Odebrecht’s former CEO, `whose stature in Brazil was comparable to Adani,’ Davis said. `What’s interesting here is that the Americans are going after the individual … but in terms of the economic and political ramifications, the proceeding is similar in scale.’”
In the 24 hours after the indictments were made public, Adani’s companies lost some $20 billion in market value, and $2.6 billion in contracts in Kenya were canceled because of the charges.
Federal prosecutors don’t really expect the charges to stick, however, since they realize the incoming Trump administration could stop the process. Adani has been public about his support for Trump. Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor, explained the timing of the charges to FT:
”[There was] an effort to get the nature of the charges out … before the change of administration.… [A new president] may cause those charges to be changed, withdrawn or otherwise impeded, but the allegations will still be out there and at the very least, the market and the public will have a sense of what the investigation has been about,” Richman said.
