Adani Group’s Math Mic Drop: FT article behind Rahul’s Rs. 20,000 CR ‘shell’ claim trashed

The Adani Group has sent a point-by-point reply to an article published in the Financial Times maligning the company. In a strongly worded reply, the Adani Group has pointed out to publicly available information that was ignored in the reportage of Financial Times and dismissed allegations of ’roundtripping’. They’ve also accused the Financial Times of deliberately ignoring its own coverage of stake sales in order to present a malafide picture. Calling the article a ‘mendacious, deliberate, and lazy’ attempt and asking that it be removed immediately.

This was the same article which Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had used as a source to make an allegations of Rs. 20,000 crores coming from shell companies.

The note clarifies that $ 2.5 billion out of total stake sales of $2.8 billion were invested back into the group businesses. The stake sales were well known matter of public record.

Adani Group’s promoters had raised $ 2 Bn through the sale of a 20% stake in Adani Green Energy Ltd (AGEL) to TotalEnergies of France in January 2021. $ 700 million was raised in October 2019 through a 37.4% stake sale in Adani Total Gas Ltd.

“Your article of 22 March 2023 “Indian Data Reveals Adani empire’s reliance on offshore funding” is, on the face of it, a mendacious, deliberate effort to attempt to paint the Adan family and the Adani Group in the worst possible light. In doing so, it reveals a willingness to be selective in using publicly available facts, lazy in its approach to understanding disclosures to which your reporters were directed, and makes insinuations that are false and damaging,” the letter by the Adani Group stated slamming the publication.

In another attempt to malign Indian enterprise, the Financial Times newspaper had claimed in its report titled “Indian Data Reveals Adani empire’s reliance on offshore funding” that almost half of all foreign direct investment into the conglomerate in recent years came from offshore entities linked to the Gautam Adani family.

Calling it a ‘mendacious, deliberate, and lazy’ attempt and asking that it be removed immediately.

The rejoinder issued on Monday said, “Our statement to your reporter, that all the transactions about which the Financial Times inquired have been publicly disclosed, is accurate, and the story amply demonstrates that your reporters conveniently chose not to look in a meaningful way at those public
disclosures or even at the related press releases (including ones that the Financial Times covered at the time).”

“If your reporters had fully taken into account all of those filings and other disclosures, they would have been simply unable to include – with any honesty – their subjective epithets about “hard-to-scrutinise money flows”, “opaque overseas investments” and “funds of unclear provenance,” it added.

Asking the publication to remove the report, Adani group said, “We ask you to take down the story immediately from your website. Further, because this story has driven misunderstanding in the market and with other media, and has become a political issue, we are compelled to share this information publicly at this time. That is regrettable, but could have been avoided by your reporters taking a careful and objective approach.”