Adani Under Attack

Gautam Adani's Empire Has Been Battered And Bruised By Allegations Of Stock Manipulation And Fraud Levelled By American Short-seller Hindenburg Research. As The Billionaire Fights Back With Several Confidence-building Measures, His Company Stocks Continue To Wobble And Global Bankers Turn Wary. Can His Mega Plans Survive This Onslaught?

- Ashish Rukhaiyar And Krishna Gopalan

GAUTAM ADANI, 60, is like the proverbial cat with nine lives. The highly controversial school dropout-turned-global business tycoon has faced countless challenges in his lifetime, even death, and only emerged stronger. In 2008, the Adani Group Chairman and Founder survived the 26/11 terrorist attack at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel, where he was dining when the attackers struck. A decade prior, on New Year’s Day of 1998, Adani was kidnapped by two gangsters in Ahmedabad, and was held to ransom. Whether he paid the ransom or not is not known. Neither is it consequential.

What’s important is: he survived. Both times.

Will he survive Hindenburg? There is no evidence to suggest anything to the contrary, at least not yet, albeit the Adani empire has shrunk dramatically since the US-based short-selling research firm’s allegations of accounting fraud, stock manipulation and routing of funds through overseas shell companies were revealed in its report on January 24 (see chart ‘Hindenburg Alleges…’). Despite a 413-page rebuttal to the charges, which Hindenburg dismissed as inconsequential, Adani’s listed firms were battered by the markets, recovering now and then only to plunge further on more bad news. All through this mayhem, the burly billionaire has maintained a stoic posture, once in a while floating a confidence-building measure here, and another there (see chart ‘Confidence-Building Measures’).