MUMBAI: Seven of the 10 listed
Adani group companies
have received
showcause notices
from
markets regulator
Sebi for
alleged violations
of various rules including disclosure &
related-party transaction norms
. The companies that received the notices said that the notices have no material impact on their businesses.
The markets regulator sent notices to flagship Adani Enterprises, Adani Energy Solutions, Adani Green Energy, Adani Ports, Adani Power, Adani Total Gas and Adani Wilmar.
If charges mentioned in the notices are proved, monetary or other penalties may follow. In all the seven companies, auditors qualified their reports after mentioning Sebi’s showcause notices. Neither the companies nor their auditors gave details of the charges mentioned in Sebi’s showcause notices.
The notices to the seven Adani companies are significant in the light of a
Supreme Court-directed probe
by the markets regulator that started about a year ago.
In Jan 2023, US-based short-seller Hindenburg Research had alleged several cases of
corporate malfeasance
against
Adani group
companies. Allegations, which Adani group denied, included round tripping using offshore entities to inflate stock prices, cooking up books of accounts and several cases of non-disclosure. As a result, over the next five weeks, the group’s stocks were on a free fall, wiping out about 65% of the group’s total market value from a peak of Rs 19.2 lakh crore just a day before the report was published on Jan 24, 2023.
A case was filed in the Supreme Court, which then had asked Sebi to investigate the allegations made in the Hindenburg report. In Jan this year, the SC had passed its order in the investigation and had asked Sebi to complete two of the 24 issues it was looking into.
On Friday, Adani Green Energy said its fourth-quarter profit dropped by 70% from a year earlier, when a foreign exchange gain helped boost the earnings. Gautam Adani’s green energy unit posted net income of Rs 150 crore ($18 million) in the March quarter, it said in a stock exchange filing on Friday. Total income dropped 5.7% due to one-time adjustments in the year-earlier revenue. Adani Enterprises stock fell nearly 2% on Friday a day after it said that it had received two showcause notices from Sebi during the March quarter.
