Adani family's partners used 'opaque' funds to invest in its stocks

Millions of dollars were invested in some publicly traded stocks of India's Adani Group via "opaque" Mauritius funds that "obscured" involvement of alleged business partners of the Adani family, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) said in an article on Thursday.

Citing review of files from multiple tax havens and internal Adani Group emails, the non-profit global network of investigative journalists said it had found at least two cases where the investors bought and sold Adani stock through such offshore structures.

Shares of Adani Enterprises, the flagship company of the group, fell 2% after publication of the report, while Adani Ports, Adani Power, Adani Green, Adani Total Gas and Adani Wilmar slid between 1%-2%, each.

The OCCRP article comes after US-based short-seller Hindenburg Research accused the Adani Group in January of improper business dealings, including the use of offshore entities in tax havens such as Mauritius from where it said certain offshore funds "surreptitiously" owned stock in Adani's listed firms.

Adani Group has called Hindenburg's claims misleading and without evidence and said it always complied with laws.

Days following the January report though, Adani group stocks lost $150 billion in market value and remain down around $100 billion following a recovery in recent months after it repaid some debt and regained some investor confidence.

In a statement to OCCRP, Adani Group said the Mauritius funds investigated by reporters had already been named in the Hindenburg report and the "allegations are not only baseless and unsubstantiated but are rehashed from Hindenburg's allegations."

"It is categorically stated that all the Adani Group's publicly listed entities are in compliance with all applicable laws including the regulation relating to public share holdings," it told the OCCRP, according to the news article.

Reuters has not independently verified OCCRP's assertions.

The Adani Group said it categorically rejected what it called recycled allegations "in their entirety," adding that the timing of the news reports was suspicious, mischievous and malicious.

HINDENBURG SAGA, REGULATORY PROBE

The Hindenburg report significantly hit Gautam Adani, the billionaire who leads the ports-to-energy conglomerate and was until January the world's third-richest person. The crisis forced him to shelve a $2.5 billion share sale and convince banks about his business credentials.

India's Supreme Court later appointed a panel to oversee a market regulator probe based on the Hindenburg report. The panel in May said the regulator had so far "drawn a blank" in investigations into suspected violations in overseas investments in the Adani Group.

Last week, the regulator said its report was nearing completion and its investigation on some offshore deals was taking time as some entities were located in tax haven jurisdictions. The regulator "shall take appropriate action based on outcome of the investigations," it said.

The regulator, Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the OCCRP report.

The OCCRP report on Thursday named two individual investors who made the investments it investigated for its article - Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli and Chang Chung-Ling - described by OCCRP as "longtime business partners" of the Adani family.

The media organization said there was no evidence Chang and Ahli's money for their investments came from the Adani family, but said its reporting and documents - including an agreement, corporate records and an email - showed there "is evidence" that their trading in Adani stock "was coordinated with the family."

"The question of whether this arrangement is a violation of the law rests on whether Ahli and Chang should be considered to be acting on behalf of Adani 'promoters,' a term used in India to refer to the majority owners of a business," OCCRP said.

If so, OCCRP said, their stake in Adani holdings would exceed the 75% limit allowed for insider ownership.

Ahli and Chang did not respond to OCCRP's requests for comment, the news article said. Reuters could not immediately reach Ahli and Chang for comment.

In an interview with a reporter from the Guardian, OCCRP said Chang said he knew nothing about any secret purchases of Adani stock. He asked why journalists were not interested in his other investments and said, "We are a simple business."