Report says close associates of India's Adani Group secretly purchased large numbers of shares

abcnews.go.com:

Two people closely linked to India’s Adani Group, one of the country’s largest conglomerates, secretly purchased of millions of dollars of stocks in the group’s companies, possibly violating Indian law, according to a report by a network of investigati...

NEW DELHI — Two people closely linked to India's Adani Group, one of the country's largest conglomerates, secretly purchased millions of dollars of stocks in the group's companies, possibly violating Indian law, according to a report Thursday by a network of investigative journalists.

Market rules require that at least 25% of a company's shares be available for public purchase. The report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project said the two men used “opaque investment funds based in the island nation of Mauritius" to obscure their involvement in controlling up to nearly 14% of the public shares.

The findings by the non-profit project were reported by The Guardian and The Financial Times. The project said they were based on files from multiple tax havens, bank records and internal Adani Group emails.

It identified the two investors as Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli and Chang Chung-Ling, and said they have longtime business ties to the Adani family and have served as directors and shareholders in the group’s companies.

The two investors traded large amounts of shares in four Adani companies between 2013 and 2018, the report said.

The Adani Group rejected the report, saying all of its publicly listed entities were in compliance with the law.

Stocks in all 10 of the Adani Group’s listed companies fell by up to 4% in trading Thursday afternoon.

The AP has not independently verified the allegations.

The report said that through the Mauritius funds, the two men