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Indian billionaire Gautam Adani has been charged by federal prosecutors in New York in connection with an alleged years-long scheme to bribe Indian officials in exchange for favourable terms on solar power contracts projected to bring in more than $2bn in profit.

The 62-year-old tycoon, who chairs the multinational conglomerate Adani Group and has been a vocal supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was indicted in Brooklyn on charges including securities fraud alongside seven others, including executives of Adani energy subsidiaries and former employees of a Canadian pension fund.

His nephew Sagar Adani, who is the executive director at a renewables company founded by Gautam Adani, is also among the defendants.

US prosecutors said more than $250mn in bribes were paid between 2020 and 2024 to people in the Indian government as part of the scheme, which was allegedly concealed from the US banks and investors from which they raised billions of dollars.

They claimed that Gautam Adani met with an Indian official to “advance” the scheme.

The US attorney’s office in Brooklyn also charged three former employees of large Canadian pension fund CDPQ in connection with the alleged scheme, saying they obstructed an investigation into the bribes by deleting emails and agreeing to provide false information to the US government. CDPQ, which invests in infrastructure projects, is a shareholder in Adani companies.

The indictments threaten to reignite a reputational crisis for Adani Group, which has been trying to move past claims of accounting fraud and stock market manipulation made last year by US short seller Hindenburg Research.

“This indictment alleges schemes to pay over $250 million in bribes to Indian government officials,” US deputy assistant attorney-general Lisa Miller said. “These offences were allegedly committed by senior executives and directors to obtain and finance massive state energy supply contracts through corruption and fraud at the expense of US investors.”

Prosecutors further alleged that the defendants “extensively documented their corrupt efforts” on mobile phones, on PowerPoint presentations and in Excel spreadsheets “that summarised various options for paying and concealing bribe payments”.

In a parallel civil lawsuit, the US Securities and Exchange Commission said the alleged bribes were paid in order to “secure [the Indian government’s] commitment to purchase energy at above-market rates that would benefit Adani Green and Azure Power”, two renewable energy companies in India.

Adani Green, which is building one of the largest solar plants in the world at Khavda in India’s western state of Gujarat, raised more than $175mn from US investors as part of a $750mn corporate bond while the scheme was ongoing, US regulators said.

Gautam Adani and Sagar Adani allegedly “induced US investors to buy Adani Green bonds through an offering process that misrepresented not only that Adani Green had a robust anti-bribery compliance programme but also that the company’s senior management had not and would not pay or promise to pay bribes”, said Sanjay Wadhwa, acting director at the SEC’s enforcement division. 

According to the regulator’s complaint, Sagar Adani allegedly told Azure executives and others about “incentives”, or bribes, he had been proposing to “motivate” state officials to agree contracts with the Indian government’s arm responsible for implementing renewable energy programmes.

Adani and Azure did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In a statement, CDPQ said: “CDPQ is aware of charges filed in the US against certain former employees. Those employees were all terminated in 2023 and CDPQ is co-operating with US authorities. In light of the pending cases, we have no further comment at this time.”

The Indian group’s founder has over the past two decades built Adani into one of India’s most formidable industrial groups, diversifying from its core ports and trading business into mining, airports, coal and renewable power.

Outside India it has built or bid for power, port and other infrastructure projects in several countries, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Israel, where it operates the port of Haifa.

In a post on X congratulating Donald Trump on his US election victory earlier this month, Adani said his group was “committed to leveraging its global expertise” and would invest $10bn in American energy security and infrastructure projects as part of the partnership between India and the US, with the aim of creating up to 15,000 jobs.

Adani’s rise in business, first in Gujarat then nationally, has coincided with the Indian state’s drive to harness private-sector expertise and capital to develop neglected transport and other infrastructure, which has accelerated during Modi’s decade in power.

As shares of his listed companies rose, in 2022 Adani briefly overtook rival billionaire Mukesh Ambani to become Asia’s richest man. 

The Indian National Congress party’s Rahul Gandhi, who became India’s opposition leader after this year’s general election, called for an investigation after the Hindenburg allegations and questioned Adani’s record of winning government tenders, as well as his close ties with ruling politicians including Modi, who is also from Gujarat.

The Adani Group dismissed the Hindenburg report as an “attack on India” and has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. His companies’ share prices have since rebounded.

The federal courts have taken “extensive” steps to protect workers from abuse, discrimination and harassment since the rise of the #MeToo movement, by creating more paths to report misbehavior and offering a new training session for in-house investigators, U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad Jr. said Wednesday.

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which handles the judiciary’s administration, reported that the overall number of complaints against federal judges remains small, with just three brought by judiciary employees under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act in the last fiscal year. Many more complaints are handled internally, through mediation, court leaders said.

“In some ways, we have more of a middle management problem than a judicial problem,” said Conrad, who was named director of the Administrative Office earlier this year — pointing to statistics showing many complaints are not about judges per se but about other court employees.

However, some outside critics and former court employees say workers they’ve talked to don’t trust the internal system and don’t use it to report complaints, meaning any statistics are likely to be undercounted.

Conrad said the courts are making “steady, sustained” progress toward tearing down barriers to report misconduct for the 30,000 people who work in their buildings — from judges and their staff, to federal public defenders.

“This is not the systemic failure that some critics stuck in a six-year time warp have used to describe the judiciary’s efforts,” Conrad added. “The journey has not reached its destination, but we are committed and have demonstrated this commitment with concrete steps.”

Abusive conduct, retaliation complaints

The bulk of complaints against judges involve abusive conduct, the new report said, followed by allegations of retaliation against people who report problems.

In July, a federal judge in Alaska resigned after investigators found he engaged in a sexual relationship with a former clerk and created a hostile working environment in his chambers.

Aliza Shatzman, who interacts with many current and former federal law clerks through her Legal Accountability Project, said the people she talks with “have not and would not report misconduct” because they do not believe it would be taken seriously or investigated vigorously.

“(W)ith limited remedies available, no legal protection against retaliation, and, sadly, often no legal counsel to assist them, it is difficult to convince law clerks to stick their necks out and blow the whistle on misconduct,” Shatzman said. “Law clerks face enormous headwinds in reporting misconduct, and the federal judiciary does not make the process any easier.”

The quality of legal protections for judiciary employees have been hotly debated in Congress and reviewed in two separate audits this year. A pair of reports by the Government Accountability Office and the National Academy of Public Administration offered recommendations the judiciary continues to review.

Rep. Norma Torres, a California Democrat who has called on the judiciary to do more to shield workers from abuse, said in a written statement Wednesday that “deep concerns and significant questions” linger about the courts’ commitment to reform.

“Sexual assault and harassment are pervasive issues that demand substantive and urgent action, not rhetoric,” Torres said. “It is troubling to continue to see insufficient steps being taken to address the concerns raised by the House Appropriations Committee, and I will continue to closely monitor the judiciary’s efforts, or lack thereof, to protect the safety and dignity of all individuals, inside and outside the courthouse.”

Workforce survey not public

Torres is one of several critics who want to see the results of a national workforce survey the federal courts administered in 2023, but which is still not public. Judge Conrad said confidentiality concerns meant the findings would remain under wraps, but that administrators are assessing the survey results and would follow through early next year.

Court leaders emphasized that in some ways, their systems go beyond other offerings for federal workers, by, for instance, allowing people to report instances of hostile or abusive behavior. Conrad said the code of conduct for federal judges now prohibits abuse or harassment by judges themselves as well as failing to report “reliable” instances of potential wrongful acts they observe by others.

The Office of Judicial Integrity at the courts’ headquarters in Washington, D.C., has expanded to include three people, with two more expected to come on board. That office holds training for court systems nationwide. Since the federal courts operate in a patchwork, with different rules and management across a dozen or so circuit court systems, there are about a dozen more employees who handle workplace complaints spread out across the country.

The systems for reporting misconduct can be byzantine, and contribute to employees’ inability to find lawyers to help them navigate the process. Some auditors have recommended employees who bring complaints with merit should be able to recover attorney fees.

“I get that the judiciary is trying to do more to protect its workers,” said Gabe Roth, who fights for more transparency through his nonprofit group Fix the Court. “But there remain obvious reforms they appear to not even be considering, from ensuring mistreated staff have access to legal assistance to mandating workplace conduct training for judges and other managers, and these omissions do not instill a lot of confidence.”

Roth and other close observers of the federal courts said the internal system for resolving employee disputes remains rife with potential conflicts of interest, because a judge overseeing the dispute can work in the same courthouse as the judge who is the subject of a complaint.

The judiciary has said multiple ways to report complaints are meant to mitigate the problem of conflicts of interest.

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