On Wednesday, November 20, a court in New York accused Indian industrialist Gautam Adani, 62, his nephew Sagar, who is director at the group’s renewable energy unit Adani Green Energy Ltd, and 6 other defendants. The New York attorney alleged that the individuals agreed to pay about USD 265 million in bribes to Indian government officials between 2020 and 2024 to obtain lucrative solar energy supply contracts.
They argued that the contracts were obtained on terms that expected to yield USD 2 billion of profit over 20 years, according to an indictment unsealed in a New York court on Wednesday.
The Adani Group has denied all the accusations and said that they will seek all possible legal recourse to clear their name against these accusations.
Notably, US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will have to serve the summons on Adani Group Founder and Chairman Gautam Adani and his nephew Sagar in the alleged payoffs through proper diplomatic channels as it has no jurisdiction to summon a foreign national directly.
Even seasoned diplomats like Kanwal Sibal have called out the silliness behind such a move by US SEC to summon Gautam Adani.
PTI report from New York carried by our newspapers that the US SEC has sent summons to Adani’s residence in Ahmedabad makes no sense. There is no way that a foreign authority can issue summons to an Indian national in India directly. They have to go through the government of…
— Kanwal Sibal (@KanwalSibal) November 24, 2024
SEC wants Adanis to explain themselves over allegations of paying bribes to secure lucrative solar power contracts, but that request will have to follow the established protocol of routing it through the Indian Embassy in the US.
US SEC has no jurisdiction over foreign nationals, and as Gautam Adani is an Indian citizen, they don’t have any jurisdiction over Adani.
These matters between India and USA are covered under the 1965 Hague Convention and the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. These agreements clearly lay out the established procedure to be followed in such requests.
Earlier, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York, “A five-count criminal indictment was unsealed in federal court charging Gautam Adani, Sagar R. Adani, and Vineet S. Jain, with conspiracies to commit securities and wire fraud and substantive securities fraud for their roles in a multi-billion-dollar scheme to obtain funds from U.S. investors and global financial institutions on the basis of false and misleading statements.”
However, as per the well established law, the US SEC has no jurisdiction over Indian national Gautam Adani, and this seems like just a witch hunt to promote current US establishment’s political interests in India.
