The United States Treasury has announced that it had reached a $275 million settlement with India's Adani Enterprises Limited over alleged violations of sanctions against Iran.
"The US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) today announced a $275,000,000 settlement with Adani Enterprises Limited (AEL), an Ahmedabad, India-based company," a US statement said on Monday.
"AEL agreed to settle its potential civil liability for 32 apparent violations of OFAC's Iran sanctions."
Adani Enterprises had bought shipments of liquefied petroleum gas from a Dubai-based trader purporting to supply Omani and Iraqi gas that had actually originated from Iran, Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control said in a statement.
Separately, the US Securities and Exchange Commission settled a civil lawsuit against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani over an alleged scheme to bribe Indian government officials, court records showed last week, although the move is subject to court approval.
The Justice Department is also close to dropping related criminal fraud charges against Adani, who has promised to invest $10 billion in the US economy, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
In the lawsuit filed in late 2024, the US commission accused Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and his nephew Sagar Adani — both leaders of the energy company Adani Green Energy Limited — of promising to pay Indian government officials the equivalent of $250 million in exchange for government contracts to purchase energy at inflated rates.
At the same time, the company secured several billions of dollars from Wall Street investors who were allegedly assured that the company had a robust anti-bribery compliance programme and were given promises from senior management that no bribery would take place.
Those actions, the SEC said at the time, violated antifraud provisions of US securities laws.
Court documents show that Gautam Adani agreed to pay civil penalties of $6 million while his nephew agreed to pay $12 million.
The proposed settlement doesn’t include an admission of guilt.
The Adani Group denied the allegations at the time, calling them baseless.
Modi acolyte
Adani, along with his nephew Sagar Adani, agreed to the "payment of a civil penalty" totalling $18 million, while noting that it came "without admitting or denying the allegations made in the civil complaint", a letter from Adani Green Energy to the Mumbai stock exchange said on Friday.
The New York Times said the move to abandon the charges, brought under US president Joe Biden's administration, came after Adani hired a new legal team led by Robert Giuffra, one of President Donald Trump's personal lawyers.
With a business empire spanning coal, airports, cement and media, the chairman of Adani Group has been rocked in recent years by corporate fraud allegations and a stock crash.
Adani, a close ally of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was born in Ahmedabad in Gujarat state to a middle-class family but dropped out of school at 16.
He moved to India's financial capital, Mumbai, to find work in the city's lucrative gem trade.
After a short stint in his brother's plastics business, he launched the flagship family conglomerate that bears his name in 1988 by branching out into the export trade.
His big break came seven years later with a contract to build and operate a commercial shipping port in Gujarat.
