A billionaire Indian family with close ties to the country's prime minister, Narendra Modi, secretly invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the Indian stock market, buying their companies' own shares, newly disclosed documents suggest.
According to offshore financial records seen by the Guardian, associates of the Adani family may have spent years discreetly acquiring stock in the Adani Group's own companies during its meteoric rise to become one of India's largest and most powerful businesses. By 2022, its founder, Gautam Adani, had become India's richest person and the third richest person in the world, worth more than $120bn (£95bn).
The allegations come after a report in January, published by the New York financial research firm Hindenburg, that accused the Adani Group of pulling off the "largest con in corporate history".
It alleged there had been "brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud", and the use of opaque offshore companies to buy its own shares, contributing to the "sky high" market valuation of the conglomerate, which had hit a peak of $288bn in 2022.
The Adani Group denied the Hindenburg claims, which initially wiped $100bn off the conglomerate's market value and cost Adani his prime spot on the world rich list. At the time, the group called the research a "calculated attack on India" and on "the independence, integrity and quality of Indian institutions".
Yet new documents obtained by the investigative journalists of the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), and shared with the Guardian and the Financial Times, reveal the details of an undisclosed and complex offshore operation in Mauritius - seemingly controlled by Adani associates that was allegedly used to support the share prices of its group of companies from 2013 to 2019. Up until now, this offshore network had remained impenetrable.
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