Prosecutors’ decision to abandon their case against Gautam Adani comes after a defense campaign led by one of President Donald Trump’s lawyers.
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A federal judge has ordered the Justice Department to justify its decision to abandon a bribery and fraud indictment against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, refusing to immediately grant prosecutors’ request to dismiss the charges in a case that had drawn international attention.
In an order Friday, U.S. District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis in New York said the government “failed to meet its obligation to supply adequate reasoning and sufficient facts to support dismissal.”
Though Gaurafis ultimately has little discretion to deny the government’s request, he ordered prosecutors to explain in detail by July 13 their reasons for believing that the prosecution is no longer viable or in the public interest.
The order delivered another rebuke to a department that has previously encountered pushback from the courts for decisions to reverse course on high-profile prosecutions.
When prosecutors sought to dismiss a corruption case against former New York mayor Eric Adams last year, saying it no longer aligned with the Trump administration’s objectives, the judge overseeing that matter appointed an outside counsel to provide an independent evaluation before he eventually granted the request.
Adani, a close ally of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Brooklyn during the final months of the Biden administration.
Prosecutors accused him and several executives at one of his businesses of paying millions to Indian government officials to secure energy supply contracts in that country while deceiving U.S. investors by publicly espousing an anti-bribery stance. The Justice Department last month filed court papers seeking to dismiss the case.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday on Gaurafis’s request for further explanation. An attorney for Adani declined to comment, instead pointing to a letter the defense team filed with the court earlier this week.
“The DOJ’s decision reflects its careful consideration of the indictment’s legal and factual weaknesses,” it read. “The DOJ seeks to dismiss the Indictment after months of detailed and extensive communications and meetings with counsel … regarding the law and facts governing this case — including numerous written submissions and oral presentations by counsel, the production of documents, and the consideration of reports prepared by prominent experts in the United States and India.”
At the time of his indictment, Adani and his company condemned the allegations against him as “baseless.” As a foreign national who was not arrested or brought to the U.S., Adani did not personally appear in court or enter a plea to the charges.
That hadn’t stopped the prosecution from becoming a point of friction between the U.S. and India in the years since. Adani has amassed a fortune estimated to be worth more than $104 billion as head of the Adani Group, a powerhouse conglomerate in South Asia with holdings in ports, coal mines and airports.
Hard-liners there have urged Modi to forcefully condemn the Justice Department’s efforts. So far, though, the Indian prime minister has said little publicly to defend one of his country’s most successful entrepreneurs.
After a White House summit last year, Modi characterized his ally’s legal troubles as a personal issue, not a matter of state.
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He has not commented on the issue since the Justice Department announced its decision last month not to bring the case against Adani to trial.
The Washington Post has reported that the decision to seek the dismissal came after a concerted defense campaign to persuade top officials, led by one of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyers.
After unsuccessfully petitioning the department for a similar outcome last year, Adani hired a legal team led by Robert J. Giuffra Jr., a top New York litigator and co-chair of the Manhattan law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. Giuffra represents Trump in the president’s appeals of his hush money conviction as well as a civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
In April, Giuffra and his team met with top Justice Department officials in D.C. hoping to convince them that the criminal case against Adani and a parallel civil suit brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission would not hold up in court, The Post has reported.
As part of that presentation, the attorneys highlighted investments Adani had promised to make in the U.S. following Trump’s election, according to two people familiar with the discussion who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Those people, however, downplayed the influence of that pledge on the Justice Department’s ultimate decision to drop the case. They described it as only a small part of the defense’s presentation, which was primarily focused on why Adani’s lawyers thought the case against him would falter before a jury.
The department announced its decision in a one-page motion filed with the court last month, signed by R. Trent McCotter, a high-ranking Justice Department official, and Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
The Justice Department, the motion said, had opted, “in its prosecutorial discretion, not to devote further resources to these criminal charges.”
The move marked the latest instance of the Trump administration reversing a Biden-era prosecutorial decision at the urging of outside lawyers close to the president or his allies. It came as the Justice Department has retreated more broadly from prosecuting foreign bribery schemes of the type with which Adani was charged.
Since his return to the White House, Trump has pushed the Justice Department to curtail such prosecutions, saying U.S. laws that bar companies from making payoffs to overseas officials hinder the ability of American businesses to compete in foreign markets where such transactions are common.
In addition to the department’s proposed resolution in Adani’s criminal case, lawyers for the SEC asked a federal judge in Brooklyn to approve an $18 million settlement that would end its lawsuit against Adani and others for the same conduct alleged in the criminal indictment. As part of that deal, Adani has agreed to pay $6 million in financial penalties while his nephew, also a defendant in the case, would pay fines of $12 million. Neither Adani nor his nephew would admit wrongdoing as part of that deal.
Garaufis, who is also overseeing that case, has not yet indicated whether he intends to grant the settlement his approval.
Adani’s company, the Adani Group, has also agreed to pay a $275,000 settlement with the Treasury Department.
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