US To Drop Graft Charges Against Adani: NYT

US prosecutors are set to drop charges against billionaire Indian industrialist Gautam Adani, who was accused of paying hundreds of millions of dollars of bribes and hiding the payments, The New York Times reported Thursday. With a business empire spanning coal, airports, cement and media, the chairman of Adani Group has been rocked in recent years by corporate fraud allegations and a stock crash.

Adani was alleged in November 2024 to have agreed to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials for lucrative solar energy supply contracts. The Times said the move to abandon the charges, brought under US president Joe Biden’s administration, came after Adani hired new lawyers led by Robert Giuffra, one of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyers.

The Times reported that at a meeting between defense and prosecution at the Department of Justice in April, Giuffra presented slides including one that said that if prosecutors dropped the charges, Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy and create 15,000 jobs.

Prosecutors previously detailed how one of Adani’s alleged accomplices meticulously tracked payments, using his phone to log the bribes offered to officials. Adani was born in Ahmedabad and moved to financial capital Mumbai to find work in the city’s lucrative gem trade. 

After a short stint in his brother’s plastics business, he launched the flagship family conglomerate that bears his name in 1988 by branching out into the export trade.

His big break came seven years later with a contract to build and operate a commercial shipping port in Gujarat.