NEW DELHI: Gautam Adani’s net fortune plummeted by $10 billion during the early trading hours of Monday as the Adani Group's stocks nosedived again on the domestic exchanges amid the ongoing spat with US-based short seller and investor activist firm Hindenburg Research.
With this fresh fall, the wealth gap between Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani and Adani is now around $2-3 billion, the closest in months. Last year when Adani had briefly climbed to the second spot on the global rich list, his net wealth was $40-50 billion north of Mukesh Ambani.
According to Forbes' real-time billionaire index, Gautam Adani’s position in the wealth list fell from the 7th spot on Friday to the 8th spot on Monday after his wealth deteriorated by a whopping $10 billion to $86.7 billion. He is just $300 million wealthier than Larry Page (Google) whose wealth is estimated at $86.4 billion.
Mukesh Ambani’s current wealth, according to Forbes, is estimated at $84 billion.
If the Adani Group's share prices fall any further, Gautam Adani’s name may soon be removed from the top 10 rich list. On Monday, Adani Total Gas, Adani Transmission and Adani Green fell 20 per cent each while Adani Wilmer and Adani Power were locked into their lower circuit of 5 per cent.
The Group’s flagship Adani Enterprises (AEL) and Adani Ports (APSEZ) gave up their early gains by 11 am after hitting the upper circuit of 10 per cent. While AEL was trading with a minor gain of 3 per cent, APSEZ was trading in the red.
India’s and Asia’s richest billionaire- Gautam Adani’s- fortune fell sharply on Friday and his ranking in the global rich list came down to the 7th spot. According to Forbes, Adani’s wealth tumbled by $22.6 billion in one single session on Friday and his fortune fell below the coveted $100 billion mark to $96.4 billion.
Adani, who runs the port-to-power conglomerate, had scaled to 2nd position in the rich list last year when Group Stock prices witnessed a big rally. He remained in 3rd position for a long time and was recently replaced by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ($ 125 billion). Bernard Arnault (Louis Vitton) dominates the rich list with a fortune of $213 billion followed by Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter) whose net worth was last pegged at $181 billion.
Adani’s rise in the global rich list has been extraordinary. In just a few years, from being just another billionaire, he has risen to become one of the world’s richest and most powerful billionaires.
His fall in the wealth list comes after Hindenburg called the share prices of its 7 listed companies "overvalued," questioned the role of close family members, and raised objections about shell companies among other serious allegations.
Hindenburg has accused the port-to-power conglomerate of pulling the "largest con in corporate history" by engaging in “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud” over the course of two decades.
The Adani Group has called the report "maliciously mischievous and unresearched" and said it was evaluating legal action. On late Sunday, Adani called the allegations levied by Hindenburg a "calculated attack" on India, its institutions and its growth story, saying the allegations are "nothing but a lie."
Adani Group said the report was driven by "an ulterior motive" to "create a false market" to allow the US firm to make financial gains.
Reacting to Adani Group’s detailed reply, Hindenburg replied in a note titled- "Fraud cannot be obfuscated by nationalism or a bloated response that ignores every key allegation we raised."
"Our report asked 88 specific questions of the Adani Group. In its response, Adani failed to specifically answer 62 of them. Instead, it mainly grouped questions together in categories and provided generalized deflections," the activist research firm added.