Adani Group to prepay $500 million loan to foreign banks

According to Bloomberg on Wednesday, Adani Group is planning to prepay a $500 million loan next month to a group of foreign banks, including Barclays Plc and Standard Chartered. Barclays Plc, Standard Chartered Plc, and Deutsche Bank AG were among the banks that loaned $4.5 billion to finance the purchase of Holcim cement assets last year, according to the report. A portion of the loan is due on March 9.

The financial Times reported that the Adani GroupAdani Group had a margin call of more than $500 million on a $1.1 billion share-backed loan, prompting the conglomerate to repay the whole debt, according to a report by the Financial Times.

Adani Group was rocked by a US-based short seller Hindenburg Research, which accused the group of fraud and stock manipulation and said it was highly leveraged. After these charges the stocks of group companies crashed before making some recovery in the past two days, the trust of investors was shaken.

Adani has started pre-paying some of the loans whose due dates are still away to boost the confidence of the investors. Adani Ports said on Tuesday that it was expected to repay loans worth Rs 5,000 crore next financial year. Adani Ports CEO Karan Adani said the company is targeting FY 24 EBITDA of Rs 14,500 crore -- 15,000 crore.

He said that the company was considering total loan repayment and prepayment of around Rs 5,000 crore, which will improve the firm's net debt to EBITDA ratio and bring it closer to 2.5 x by March 24 due to the estimated capital expenditure of Rs 4,000 crore-Rs 4,500 crore.

The amounts to prepay $1.1 billion of the share-backed facility of the maturity of September 2024 were posted by Adani Group promoters on Monday. In a statement, the company's spokesperson said that promoters have posted amounts to prepay $1,114 million ahead of its maturity of Sep 2024 in response to recent market volatility and in continuation of the promoters commitment to reduce the overall leverage backed by Adani Listed Company shares. Mark Mobius is not interested in Adani Group stocks, and BT EXCLUSIVE: