NEW DELHI: Billionaire Gautam Adani on Tuesday reiterated that the Hindenburg Research report was a combination of targeted misinformation and discredited allegations, the majority of them dating from 2004 to 2015.
Adani said all of these were settled by the appropriate authorities at that time and added that this report was a deliberate and malicious attempt aimed at damaging their reputation and generating profits through a short-term drive-down of stock prices.
“While we promptly issued a comprehensive rebuttal, various vested interests tried to exploit the claims made by the short seller. These entities encouraged and promoted false narratives across various news and social media platforms,” said Adani while addressing the 31st Annual General Meeting (AGM) of his flagship company Adani Enterprises.
On January 24, Hindenburg, a US-based firm that specialises in activist short-selling, released a scathing report which said that Adani Group has “engaged in a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades”.
The report detailed a web of Adani-family-controlled offshore shell entities in tax havens spanning the Caribbean and Mauritius to the United Arab Emirates, which it claims were used to facilitate corruption, money laundering and taxpayer theft while siphoning off money from the group’s listed companies.
Adani Group has denied the allegations multiple times but the damage caused by the report on the group companies’ share prices is unprecedented. In the first few weeks, the Group lost over Rs 12 lakh in market capitalisation. At present, shares of some Adani companies are down over 70% since the time the report was published.
Gautam Adani said that the report of the Supreme Court-appointed Expert Committee did not find any regulatory failure. The Committee’s Report not only observed that the mitigating measures, undertaken by your company helped rebuild confidence but also cited that there were credible charges of targeted destabilization of the Indian markets.