Justice Department moves to drop fraud charges against Gautam Adani

The Justice Department moved to abandon its criminal fraud case against Gautam Adani, a striking reversal in a prosecution that once cast one of India’s most powerful businessmen as the face of a global bribery and investor-fraud scheme. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn asked Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis to dismiss the fraud and conspiracy charges, but the judge still must approve the request.

The filing said the department had reviewed the case and, in its prosecutorial discretion, decided not to devote further resources to the criminal charges against the individual defendants. Adani’s lawyers and the lawyers for his co-defendants agreed to the dismissal request. Robert Giuffra, who represents Adani, declined to comment.

Adani was indicted in federal court on November 20, 2024, alongside his nephew Sagar Adani and other executives. Prosecutors accused them of conspiring to commit securities and wire fraud, and of making false and misleading statements to obtain funds from U.S. investors and global financial institutions. The indictment alleged that more than $250 million in bribes were promised to Indian government officials to secure solar energy contracts tied to a plan to sell 12 gigawatts of power to the Indian government.

The Securities and Exchange Commission separately alleged that Adani Green raised more than $175 million from U.S. investors in a September 2021 note offering while the bribery scheme was underway. Around the same time the Justice Department sought to end the criminal case, the SEC settled its related civil lawsuit, and Adani Enterprises agreed to a separate $275 million settlement with the U.S. Treasury over alleged sanctions violations involving Iran. Adani was never arrested or brought to the United States to face trial.

For U.S. prosecutors, the retreat carries consequences beyond one billionaire and his conglomerate. The Adani case had become a test of whether Washington would aggressively pursue foreign executives whose conduct touched U.S. markets, even when the alleged misconduct was centered in India. The decision to step back, paired with the earlier suspension of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement under President Donald Trump’s administration, may be read by global investors as a signal that the United States is less willing to sustain sprawling cross-border corruption cases when they become harder to litigate or less central to enforcement priorities.

That matters for the Adani Group, whose businesses range from coal to renewable energy, defense, agriculture, airports, ports and logistics. The company denied the allegations and called them baseless. But the legal cloud has started to thin: the civil settlement with the SEC, the Treasury deal and the Justice Department’s move to drop the criminal charges together suggest a broad rollback of the government’s pressure campaign. The case, long watched in New Delhi and Washington, now stands as an early measure of how far U.S. corporate-crime enforcement will go when foreign political ties, evidentiary hurdles and shifting policy priorities collide.