How Adani’s business partners tried to accuse him and Sagar of “bribery.”

New Delhi: In order to create a “false impression” of transparency and good governance, Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani’s business partners tried to divert the attention of the US authorities from themselves and tried to place the blame for the alleged bribery case solely on Gautam Adani, Sagar , blamed on Adani and Vneet Jaain, the chargesheet reveals.

A US court late Wednesday evening (India time) Accused against Gautam Adanihis nephew Sagar Adani and several others for allegedly planning to offer bribes amounting to Rs 2,029 crore to government officials in India, conspiring to hide this from US investors who lent money to the company and obstructing US investigations -Authorities the matter.

The Adani Group, in a statement released on Wednesday, categorically denied the allegations, calling them “baseless and denied.”

Others named in the indictment include Cyril Cabanes, a former board member of Azure Power, the other energy company implicated in the indictment. Cabanes was also previously an executive at Canadian pension fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ).

The indictment also names Saurabh Agarwal, the pension fund’s former India managing director, Deepak Malhotra, its former infrastructure director for South Asia, Rupesh Agarwal, a former CEO of Azure Power, and an unnamed co-conspirator who is a former non-executive chairman of Azure Power.

In March 2022, as part of its investigation into the bribery case, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sent a “general inquiry” to Azure Power that included requests for information about all contracts the company had bid on or won since 2018.

“To achieve the objectives of the ongoing bribery scheme, beginning In or about 2022, Defendants Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal, Deepak Malhotra, and Rupesh Agarwal, and Co-Conspirator No. 1, agreed to suppress documents, conceal information, and provide false information to the United States Government to obstruct, influence and “interfere with the government’s investigation,” the indictment says.

Additionally, in August 2022, these defendants asked Azure Power’s board of directors, “to create a false appearance of transparency and good governance,” to initiate an internal investigation, conducted by a law firm headquartered in the United States and overseen by a subcommittee became the board.

Part of this “obstruction plan,” according to the indictment, was to withhold key information about the bribery scheme from the internal and U.S. government investigations.

It appears that another part of this obstruction was to reveal the names of Adani Group executives as part of the bribery scheme while protecting themselves.

“Furthermore, (Cyril) Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal, (Deepak) Malhotra, Rupesh Agarwal and Co-Conspirator No. 1 made and agreed to make certain selective disclosures in connection with the internal investigation and government investigations – namely, the disclosure of defendant Gautam S . Adanis, Sagar R. Adanis and Vneet S. Jaains ask for bribes, but they conceal their own involvement in the Bribery Scheme.”

The indictment says the strategy used by the defendants was to make it appear that the co-conspirators were reporting wrongdoing rather than committing the wrongdoing. This, in turn, aided the co-conspirators’ efforts to advance the ongoing bribery scheme and conceal its true nature from the Board and government investigations.

Additionally, the indictment alleged that since 2022, Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal, Malhotra, Rupesh Agarwal and the unnamed co-conspirator took “numerous additional steps” to conceal their own involvement in the bribery scheme and to ensnare themselves in the government’s investigation to interfere.

This included destroying or otherwise concealing evidence, including PowerPoint analysis and electronic communications.

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