‘Inactionable puffery’, personal jurisdiction, SEC remit: Why Adani lawyers want US bribery case dismissed

Mint takes a look at the arguments made by the high-profile Adani counsels and the road ahead in the case.The SEC has alleged that billionaire businessman Gautam Adani and Sagar Adani, among others, paid $250 million in bribes to unnamed government officials in India to secure favourable power-supply contracts for Adani Green Energy Ltd.The regulators further claimed that when raising capital from American investors, the Adanis did not tell them about the alleged bribes while stating the company’s anti-bribery policies, thus misleading investors and committing securities fraud.The Adani Group has denied any wrongdoing.The Adani lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the SEC case based on a lack of personal jurisdiction. The Adani kin are neither residents of the United States nor did they purposefully direct their activities towards the country, the counsels said in their motion.Gautam Adani did not personally authorize the issuance of the $750 million bonds under question or direct the sale of these bonds in the US, they said.

While the senior Adani was the chairman of Adani Green Energy’s management committee, which reviewed and approved the offering circular for the bonds, he did not attend a single meeting of the committee between 2020 and 2024, they argued.Sagar Adani, who is an executive director at Adani Green Energy and was part of the management committee meetings, did not direct any sale of the said bonds in the US, the lawyers argued. All the bonds were sold to non-US underwriters by Adani Green Energy, who later sold a part of these bonds to US investors.