Tag Archives: Gautam Adani

The Adani scandal is big. It is big because it involves hundreds of billions of dollars; valuable and important infrastructure throughout Asia and could potentially suck in the government the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

First of all, who are the key players in this saga? They are the Adani Group’s founder Gautam Adani, Nate Anderson of Hindenburg Research and Prime Minister Modi.  Last week, Adani, was the third richest man in the world. Today he is the 15th richest following the damning report by Hindenburg.

The Indian tycoon was a school dropout who started his business career in Mumbai as a diamond trader. But he soon moved back to his home state of Gujarat (where Modi was chief minister) and switched to commodities trading. Using Gujarat as his base, Adani established a business empire that includes India’s largest cement company, 13 ports, seven airports, six power stations and much more. The Adani Group even runs its own private railway and electricity supply.

Adani has 23,000 employees and ten days ago the conglomerate had a market capitalisation of $230 billion. At the end of this week it was $120 billion and falling.

Now, who is Nate or Nathaniel Anderson? He is a former New York trader who founded Hindenburg Research with the aim of blowing the whistle on corporate fraud.  Hindenburg forensic accounting techniques and good old detective work to uncover corporate fraud and corruption. It analyses public records, internal corporate documents and conducts confidential interviews with whistle blowing employees.  Most of their investigations take about six months. The Adani analysis lasted two years.