It was in September last that India ‘celebrated’ the big news: ‘Gautam Adani became the world’s third richest person on the Forbes billionaire tracker.” As people with frenzied ‘nationalist pride’ took pleasure in the meteoric rise of a fellow countryman, the shocker came that he has slipped out of the list of the world’s top 10 richest people, and the fall from the top continues day after day; he is reported to be placed at the 21st slot as we go to the Press. 

Yet another report says that Mukesh Ambani has replaced him as Asia’s wealthiest person. Adani’s net worth was reported to be around $124 billion before his nemesis started with the startling report by the US-based Hindenburg research group. This has plummeted to around $ 84 billion as reports last came in. 

One of the main exposures of the report, which triggered Adani’s downfall, is that his business group committed serious ‘malfeasances’ like the use of offshore investment funds and tainted brokers to boost its share prices and the earnings of the group companies. According to the report, ‘the Indian group had engaged in a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades,’ exposing uninterrupted level of corruption. Yet another serious exposure is that Adani has substantial debt which has put the entire group on a ‘precarious financial footing’. 

The group’s gross debt in the financial year ending March 31, 2022 rose to 2.2 trillion rupees. In another revelation, the Hong Kong brokerage Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia (CLSA) says that public sector banks hold about 30 percent of the Adani Group’s debt. This should send alarm bells ringing as any threat to the financial base of public sector banks would hit crores of their account holders, putting their hard-earned money at risk. 
   
As is the wont with those in conflict with law, the Adani group too has taken recourse to ‘nationalism’ and ‘national pride’ to wriggle out of the present predicament. It has termed the report ‘a malicious combination of selective misinformation and stale, baseless and discredited allegations.’ Adani considers Hindenburg report as an “attack on India”. It is apparently an attempt to hide behind ‘fake nationalism’; it is nothing but escapism. 

The government and the investigating agencies should give no credence to such claims, instead they should try to get to the bottom of the truth so that public trust is not compromised. The global investors will be keenly watching the government’s official response to the Adani episode. What is at stake is the credibility of the nation.  

The claims of Adani group will be tested in the coming days, but the fact remains that he has fallen from the pedestal erected in the last few years. His growth has hardly any parallel in the history of independent India. His net worth saw a phenomenal rise in the last one decade or so, especially after the present regime came to power at the Centre. It is an indicator how crony capitalism thrives under a favourable regime. The critics of the recent Oxfam report should take a relook at what it said: “One per cent of population owns as much as 40 per cent of the wealth created in India.”