FOIAengine: Requests Signaled Trouble for Guatam Adani
Guatam Adani, India’s most powerful tycoon and a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, knows what it’s like to stare death in the face and survive.
Danger has a knack for finding him. But each time – a 1998 kidnapping at gunpoint; the 2008 terrorist attacks at Mumbai’s iconic Taj Palace Hotel that killed 167 – Adani somehow manages to cheat fate.
“I saw death at a distance of just 15 feet,” the 62-year-old Indian billionaire, once the world’s richest person, said after surviving the days-long siege at the Taj Palace. The hostage-taking and killings were depicted in the 2019 film “Hotel Mumbai.”
Days ago, Adani was confronted with danger of a different sort: U.S. authorities are going after him.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, along with the Securities and Exchange Commission, filed fraud charges on November 20 against Adani and other executives of his Adani Group renewable-energy company, alleging that they promised to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian government officials to win solar energy contracts, and then concealed the plan as they sought to raise money from U.S. investors.
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prohibits bribery as a means of getting or maintaining business. The law applies to U.S. companies operating overseas, and to foreign companies doing business in the U.S. FCPA’s aim is to create a level playing field for ethical business practices globally.
Adani and his seven co-defendants in the criminal case, including his nephew, Sagar, are facing the prospect of decades in prison. The maximum prison time for each defendant, if convicted on all five of the criminal conspiracy and fraud counts charged in the indictment, exceeds 100 years.
The immediate effect of the indictment was a plunge in Adani Group’s stocks and bonds, wiping $27 billion off the conglomerate’s market value and sending the broader Indian market into correction territory as Modi’s political opponents pressed for Adani’s arrest. Adani Group posted a blanket denial and said “all possible legal recourse will be sought.”
Bloomberg called the charges “unprecedented,” and that was hardly an understatement. Adani Group is one of India’s largest conglomerates. As Bloomberg put it, “The indictment’s impact on Indian business and politics will be far-reaching. Not only does the Adani Group run everything from airports to power generators in the country, the conglomerate is Modi’s key partner in his efforts to build the country’s domestic infrastructure as well as widen its geopolitical influence. While the appointment of a new U.S. Attorney in New York after the return of President Donald Trump to office early next year may impact how the case plays out, Adani’s ambitions and his relationship with the Indian government will likely be permanently altered.”
As an indication of the political sensitivity of bringing criminal charges against a member of Modi’s inner circle, the indictment was kept secret for almost a month after it was handed up by the Brooklyn grand jury.
India’s extradition treaty with the U.S. allows for Adani to be arrested and brought to trial – unless Adani manages to stare down jeopardy once again.
One thing that’s particularly noteworthy about Adani’s current legal peril is how long the possibility of legal danger might have been hanging out there. That is where PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine, which tracks Freedom of Information Act requests in as close to real-time as their availability allows, comes in.
In their indictment, Brooklyn prosecutors traced Adani’s alleged bribery scheme back to 2020. But even before that, there was a signal of trouble on the horizon: a 2019 Freedom of Information Act request from an investigative reporter.
FOIA requests to the federal government can be an important early warning of bad publicity, litigation to come, or uncertainties to be hedged and gamed out. On August 15, 2019, journalist Bridget Hickey filed an exhaustive FOIA request with the Export-Import Bank, Exim for short, about Adani Group’s various holdings. Exim Bank is the federal agency that steps in to finance big foreign purchases of U.S. products when other lenders won’t take the risk.
Hickey’s FOIA request to Exim was for “any and all documents, internal and external, dated between January 1, 2013 to the date this request is received, that include reference to any of the following entities: Adani Group, Adani Enterprises, Adani Mining, Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone, Abbot Point Port Holdings, Carmichael Rail and Port Singapore Holdings, Atulya Resources Limited, Vinod Shantilal Adani, Vinod Adani, Adana Chaism, Gautam Adani, Downer EDI Limited, POSCO E&C Australia, Moray Power, RCR Tomlinson, Abbot Point, and/or Carmichael Mine. This request extends to all email communications, both incoming and outgoing, external as well as internal, any and all environmental review and risk assessment documents, requests for financing, letters of interest, and preliminary commitments. Please provide records electronically. If you decide to withhold an exempt portion of any record, please release all other segregable parts as they become available. If you withhold any record or portion of a record, please specify which statutory exemptions are claimed for each withholding. Please separately state your reasons for not invoking your discretion, as the Act allows, to release the requested information. Please describe each record withheld, including its date and size (e.g., amount of electronic memory or number of paper pages). (Date Range for Record Search: From 1/1/2013 To 8/14/2019).”
Something was up with a request that detailed. But what? Hickey currently is a reporter working for FundFire, the Financial Times’ competitive-intelligence news service with a circulation of 112,000 among hedge funds and asset managers. Previously, she was part of a Fund for Investigative Journalism team on a story about how climate change is killing Americans, published by The Guardian. She also worked as a freelance investigative reporter and researcher for the New York Times.
When we reached out to Hickey this week, she explained that her FOIA request was based on journalistic intuition that Exim Bank might have documents about Adani Group’s coal-mining operations in her native Australia. (Sixty percent of the conglomerate’s estimated $37 billion in annual revenue comes from coal.) Her hunch was based, in part, on earlier allegations by Indian customs officials that Adani Group was siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars from its Australian mining operations to overseas tax havens.
Exim Bank denied Hickey’s request the following month with a Glomar response (“we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of responsive records”), citing FOIA’s trade-secret exemption. Hickey didn’t appeal. That was the end of it. To read more about the so-called Glomar exemption, see our story, “The Glomar Hustle” from September.
It would be three years before more FOIA requests were logged into FOIAengine about Adani. Those September 12, 2022 requests came from a Los Angeles freelance legal researcher, attorney Brittany Peck. She sought, among other things, documents about Adani’s energy holdings – the enterprises also at the heart of last week’s indictment. Peck didn’t reply to our questions about reasons for her request.
By the time of Peck’s FOIA request, activist short-seller Hindenburg Research was in on the hunt, and within months would publish its own blockbuster report accusing Adani Group of massive fraud. Hindenburg titled its report “How The World’s 3rd Richest Man Is Pulling The Largest Con In Corporate History.”
According to Hindenburg’s January 24, 2023 report, “the Adani Group has previously been the focus of four major government fraud investigations which have alleged money laundering, theft of taxpayer funds, and corruption, totaling an estimated U.S. $17 billion. Adani family members allegedly cooperated to create offshore shell entities in tax-haven jurisdictions like Mauritius, the UAE, and Caribbean Islands, generating forged import/export documentation in an apparent effort to generate fake or illegitimate turnover and to siphon money from the listed companies.”
Adani Group responded to the Hindenburg report with repeated denials, and reportedly hired Wachtell Lipton, the New York law firm specializing in corporate governance, to coordinate its legal, regulatory, and public relations efforts. Wachtell Lipton didn’t respond to our request to confirm its involvement with Adani Group.
Adani Group’s most recent comment on the Hindenburg report came just a few months ago, on August 11: “The latest allegations by Hindenburg are malicious, mischievous and manipulative selections of publicly available information to arrive at pre-determined conclusions for personal profiteering with wanton disregard for facts and the law.”
Two months after Adani Group’s latest denial, the Brooklyn grand jury handed up its sealed indictment. Facing possible arrest and extradition, Guatam Adani disappeared. India’s business newspaper, Economic Times, was among those looking for him. “His whereabouts are unknown,” the paper reported, “though he is believed to be in India.” With Modi’s government seemingly in no hurry to bring out the handcuffs, Adani surfaced a few days later in the northern city of Jaipur, defiantly proclaiming: “Every attack makes us stronger.”
FOIAengine access now is available for all professional members of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of journalism. IRE is the world’s oldest and largest association of investigative journalists. Following the federal government’s shutdown of FOIAonline.gov last year, FOIAengine is the only source for the most comprehensive, fully searchable archive of FOIA requests across dozens of federal departments and agencies. FOIAengine has more robust functionality and searching capabilities, and standardizes data from different agencies to make it easier to work with. PoliScio Analytics is proud to be partnering with IRE to provide this valuable content to investigative reporters worldwide.
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John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. His most recent book is The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at JAJ@PoliScio.com.
