On August 3, Asia’s richest man Gautam Adani beat a US$265 million bribery indictment in a New York courtroom – but the federal judge who let him go used his ruling to slam the very government that brought the charges, branding its own justice department’s about-turn “concerning”, its process “highly unusual”, and its central claim that India had already investigated the allegations flatly untrue.
Two years after Adani was accused of orchestrating one of the largest foreign bribery schemes ever charged by American prosecutors, his fraud case came to a close, but the reversal that killed it has now put Washington’s own conduct on trial under intense scrutiny.
What the judge refused to swallow
For nearly two years, the US Department of Justice’s position on Adani swung from accusation to appeasement to outright abandonment. On August 10, 2026, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York finally ruled on the DOJ’s request, granting it in part and dismissing the case – but in a 47-page order, he found that only one of the eleven justifications offered by Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter actually held up. Every other reason, including the central claim that India had already investigated and cleared the allegations, was dismantled point by point.
Garaufis wrote that “the irregularities in the decision to dismiss the indictment are concerning”, and found the process, driven almost entirely by McCotter, working alongside Adani’s own defence lawyers and apparently without meaningful input from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or the career prosecutors who built the case, to be highly unusual. Two of the original prosecutors, Shy Jackson and Andrew Tyler, had already withdrawn from the case days after the dismissal motion was filed.
The result was a split verdict. The securities fraud, wire fraud conspiracy and securities fraud conspiracy counts against Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani and Vneet Jaain were dismissed with prejudice and as permanently closed. But the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) conspiracy and obstruction charges against five other defendants – Ranjit Gupta, Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal, Deepak Malhotra and Rupesh Agarwal – remain open, with Garaufis ordering the DOJ to return with a fuller factual justification by August 31.
Unpacking the original case
The saga began in October 2024, when a federal grand jury in Brooklyn returned an eight-defendant indictment built around a scheme that prosecutors called the Manufacturing Linked Project. The allegation was that Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani and Vneet Jaain, along with a group of executives tied to the company’s US-listed subsidiary and its Canadian pension-fund investor, offered and promised roughly INR 2,029 crore rupees – about US$265 million – in bribes to Indian officials, including some US$228 million earmarked for a senior Andhra Pradesh (an Indian province) official, in order to secure state power-purchase agreements projected to generate US$2 billion in profits over two decades.
The defendants were split into two tiers. The first – Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani and Jain – faced securities and wire fraud charges tied to more than US$3 billion raised from international bond and loan markets between 2020 and 2024, allegedly while concealing the bribery scheme from lenders and investors. The second – Gupta, Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal, Malhotra and Rupesh Agarwal – faced a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) conspiracy charge and an obstruction charge, accused of destroying evidence and lying to FBI and SEC investigators once the probe surfaced in 2022.
Why American courts had any jurisdiction at all
The case landed in Brooklyn because the renewable energy subsidiary at the centre of the scheme was, for a period, listed on the New York Stock Exchange; its bonds were sold to US-based institutional buyers under Rule 144A; and the wires financing its loans passed through New York banks, including the Eastern District itself. That gave prosecutors a jurisdictional foothold under both the FCPA’s “issuer” provisions and American securities and wire fraud statutes – the same hook McCotter later argued was too thin to sustain a conviction, leaning on the Supreme Court’s Morrison line of case law to argue the transactions weren’t sufficiently “domestic”.
“The United States pretending to be the world police can cause diplomatic strife and also wastes resources better spent on domestic concerns. India can better manage its internal systems than can prosecutors in Brooklyn and Washington,” the DOJ said in its court plea.
Did Adani ever describe the bribes himself?
No plea was ever entered, and every civil settlement that Adani reached was resolved without admitting wrongdoing. However, the indictment itself contains an unusually granular account: prosecutors allege that at an April 2022 meeting at the group’s Ahmedabad headquarters, Gautam Adani personally detailed the mechanics of the scheme to his own colleagues and partners – including the exact per-megawatt rate (INR 25 lakh rupees per megawatt for one tranche of contracts, INR 55 crore rupees for another) that he owed for securing certain contracts and the steps he had personally taken to offer bribes to Indian officials. A follow-up meeting on June 14, 2022 is where prosecutors said that those mechanics were finalised, with roughly US$7 million agreed to be funnelled to the Adani Group disguised as compensation rather than a bribe repayment.
Sagar Adani, separately, is accused of logging bribe rates and recipients on his mobile phone in what prosecutors dubbed the “Bribe Notes”, detailing the total bribe offered, province by province, the megawatts that it was meant to secure, the rate per megawatt, and in some cases the initials of officials due to be paid, while also updating his uncle Gautam Adani on the scheme’s progress by message, including a November 2022 exchange to which Gautam Adani is said to have simply replied “Ok”.
Elsewhere, co-defendants referred to Gautam Adani and Vineet Jain by code names such as “the big man” and “snake” when discussing the scheme. These remain unproven allegations from a now-dismissed indictment but they are the closest that the public record comes to a first-hand account rather than a third-party inference.
The Hindenburg shadow
The US indictment did not arrive in a vacuum. Nearly two years earlier, in January 2023, the New York-based short-seller Hindenburg Research had accused the group of decades of brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud, wiping tens of billions of dollars off Adani’s listed companies within days and denting Gautam Adani’s standing as Asia’s richest man. India’s Supreme Court ordered the market regulator, Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), to conclude its probe within months; instead, it dragged on for years, drawing accusations from the opposition Congress party that the regulator itself had a conflict of interest. SEBI finally cleared the group of the manipulation allegations in September 2025 – a decision which critics said mirrors the pattern now visible in the US case: years of scrutiny ending in dismissal, with underlying questions never fully tested in open court.
Why Indian courts kept refusing to look
Despite three separate attempts to drag the underlying bribery allegations before Indian courts and regulators, none ever examined them on the merits. India’s public interest litigation doctrine requires petitioners to show locus standi and a demonstrable loss to the public or the exchequer, not merely to gesture at wrongdoing reported elsewhere; the Delhi High Court dismissed a petition precisely because he could not show any such loss, ruling that grievances over a “finalised” tender process were for competing bidders to raise, not passers-by.
The Bombay High Court went further, brushing aside a plea for a CBI probe as an “abuse of the process of the court” brought by a petitioner with no connection to the case beyond a newspaper cutting. The Competition Commission of India, too, treated the allegations as a tender-design dispute falling within a procurer’s commercial prerogative, not a competition-law violation, and stressed repeatedly that dominance and abuse cannot be inferred from media reports alone. Indian courts have thus consistently found procedural or standing reasons to decline jurisdiction, leaving the substance of the bribery allegations untested in India and in a kind of legal limbo.
Adani Group’s response
Within hours of the ruling, Adani Green Energy disclosed to Indian stock exchanges that the dismissal amounted to “a complete dismissal that bars any prosecution” over the same allegations. Gautam Adani himself struck a note of vindication on X, writing that he welcomed the ruling “with humility and deep respect for the judicial process”, and thanking those who never lost faith in “India’s capacity for justice”. The Adani Group had, throughout, maintained the charges were baseless.
How the DOJ’s own stance kept shifting
The DOJ’s posture moved in stages. First came the civil clean-up when the SEC struck a deal under which Gautam and Sagar Adani would pay US$6 million and US$12 million respectively without admitting or denying the allegations, while the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control separately settled sanctions claims worth US$275 million over alleged Iranian LPG imports – a filing news platform Politico noted was submitted without the signatures of the line attorneys who had worked the case, a detail widely read as a sign of internal dissent. Only after those civil matters were largely resolved did the DOJ move, in May 2026, to drop the criminal case outright. It was only when the judge demanded more that McCotter filed a lengthy justification in July, arguing the case had been fatally weak from the outset.
That July letter by Garaufis is where the reversal became widely clear. McCotter told the court that India had “investigated many of the allegations” and “found no actionable misconduct”, pointing to three Indian rulings. Garaufis went through each one of the rulings by the Competition Commission of India, the Delhi High Court and the Bombay High Court that had refused a central investigation on the charges. None of the three, the judge wrote, had “meaningfully” engaged with the bribery allegations at all; they were decisions not to investigate, not verdicts of innocence, the judge said.
The quid pro quo question
Hanging over the entire process was Adani’s November 2024 pledge – made days before the indictment was unsealed – to invest US$10 billion in US energy and infrastructure. Reports later surfaced that Adani’s new lawyer, Robert Giuffra Jr – who also represents Donald Trump personally – raised the investment again during talks with the DOJ. Two Democratic senators, Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, publicly accused the DOJ of letting Adani have “bought his way to criminal immunity” through the promised investment.
Garaufis ordered Adani to swear a personal affidavit on the point. In it, Adani said that he was unaware of any agreement exchanging anything for the dismissal, though he acknowledged his lawyers had floated the investment as a possible part of a resolution. The judge ultimately found the US$10 billion pledge was not a formal factor in McCotter’s decision, but he did not let the episode go quietly, noting that it would be left to the public to judge what such offers do to “equal administration of justice”.
So does the sword still hang over Adani personally?
In the narrowest legal sense, no – his charges cannot be revived. But five former colleagues remain formally charged, the DOJ must explain itself again within weeks, and a sitting federal judge has now gone on record saying that the process behind the dismissal was troubling. The commercial mood, however, has already moved on: within a day of the ruling, Bloomberg reported that EdgeConneX, the group’s data-centre venture with EdgeConneX, had secured an US$800 million loan from an international lender group – financing for the very kind of American-facing infrastructure push that Adani first flagged, investment pledge in hand, back in November 2024, just before the indictment that has now largely gone away.