Adani Group chairperson loses $8 billion in net worth after scathing report

Adani Group chairperson and Asia's richest man Gautam Adani is out of the top 10 global billionaires list as he has lost $8 billion in net worth. Adani's net worth was $84.4 billion at the time of writing this story and he was in 11th place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The scathing report from the US-based activist short-seller firm Hindenburg Research has hit Gautam Adani's fortunes and Adani Group stocks. The report accused the Adani GroupAdani Group of indulging in practices such as stock manipulation, money laundering, and accounting fraud over the past decade.

The stock price of seven listed companies went up by an average of 819 per cent over a period of three years, according to the report.

The Hindenburg report stated that there was evidence of brazen accounting fraud, stock manipulation, and money laundering at Adani over the course of decades. Adani pulled off this gargantuan feat with the help of enablers in government and a cottage industry of international companies that facilitate these activities. The US-based short seller said that Vinod Adani, the elder brother of Gautam Adani, ran a labyrinth of shell companies through his close associates. Hindenburg identified 38 Mauritius shell entities run by Adani's elder brother Vinod Adani. Besides this, it identified entities in Cyprus, Singapore, the UAE and several Caribbean islands that are discreetly controlled by Vinod Adani.

Adani Group Chief Financial Officer CFO Jugeshinder Singh claimed in an exclusive interview with Business Today TV spokesman Siddharth Zarabi that Hindenburg copy-pasted information from their company disclosures and did not do proper research. Singh said that 68 of the 88 questions posed by Hindenburg are false and bogus. He said all 88 questions have been answered. Even though we did not answer all the 88 questions, they used our disclosures and did not do any research. They did not do any research - they cut, copy, pasted and the report was a hit job on the FPO. It could be worse if they did the research and misled the public. They should be asked why they misrepresented the 68 questions. Adani lost $11 billion and his net worth hit $85.4 billion according to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires Index. Adani is on the eighth spot on the top 10 list of global billionaires, according to the index.