NEW DELHI: Nearly a month after a report claimed that offshore companies linked to the Adani Group has invested at least USD 2.6 billion in the group between 2017 and 2022, the port-to-power conglomerate issued a strong rebuttal on Monday and issued details of the USD 2.87 billion stake sales in the group firms since 2019 and how USD 2.55 billion, or about Rs 20,000 crore, of this was ploughed back into business.
With this, Adani is also seeking to counter Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s claim of Rs 20,000 crore coming into the conglomerate through ‘shell companies’. Gandhi has become aggressive in attacking Adani and on several occasions has questioned the source of Rs 20,000 crore funding.
Adani Group, in a statement, on Monday said the promoters raised USD 2 billion through the sale of a 20 per cent stake in Adani Green Energy Ltd (AGEL) to TotalEnergies of France (then Total Renewables SAS). Further, in October 2019, the promoters had raised USD 700 million through the sale of a 37.4 per cent stake in Adani Total Gas Ltd.
Adani said these funds were reinvested by promoter entities to support the growth of new business and in portfolio companies such as Adani Enterprises Ltd, Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Ltd, Adani Transmission Ltd and Adani Power Ltd. Adani added that the Financial Times story incorrectly mixed primary and secondary investments, and also ignored entirely a secondary transaction of $2 billion – all so that the reporters could conveniently create an illusion of a USD 2 billion “gap in funding” to support their pre-conceived thesis of supposed round-tripping.
The debt-funded growth of the Adani group was questioned by a US short-seller Hindenburg Research in January 2023. Hindenburg alleges accounting fraud and the use of a labyrinthine network of mostly Mauritius-based shell companies to route funds into India to manipulate share prices of the group’s seven listed companies.