In all this, the US short selling investment research firm Hindenburg Research Authority dropped the bomb. Without going into complicated business terms, the people who claim that the Adani group has raised the valuation of the shares of all the companies in the books by crunching the numbers and doing various tricks. They came to this conclusion after two years of talking to numerous people, including several former Adani Group executives, and examining documents.
At the same time, they claim that Adani is doing huge financial fraud by opening shell companies in several countries like Mauritius-Caribbean Islands which have low tax rates outside the country to avoid tax. Besides, they have already leveraged many times more debt than the company’s core assets. A situation that makes investing in the company extremely dangerous. As a result, five of the 7 listed Adani Group companies have a current ratio (cash assets-current liabilities) below 1. Due to which the possibility of them drowning in financial crisis is high. The Hindenburg Research Authority also claimed that Adani Enterprises has had 5 Chief Financial Officers in the last 8 years. Which indicates that there must be some confusion in accounting and corporate governance.
According to Forbes, Gautam Adani’s wealth, the third richest man in the world, will grow at a meteoric pace in 2022. While the share price of Adani Enterprises rose 125%, the share price of several other companies in the group also more than doubled in 1 year. Adani Group’s impact on the Indian stock market is easily discernible. The Mumbai stock market went down on Wednesday as this negative report on his name came to the fore. After dipping below 800 points at one point, it ended the day down 1.27% or 778 points. The Nifty closed down almost the same amount by 1.25% (226 points) at 17891 points below the psychological level of 18,000. 3.66 lakh crores worth of investors disappeared from the market in one day.
Naturally, this light also fell on Adani. He lost more than 48 thousand crore rupees as his share price fell by 10% in a single day. Adani Enterprises, Adani Transmission, Adani Power, Adani Ports, ACC, Ambuja Cement – none of the 10 Adani group companies were left out of the list. It may be noted that earlier in August 2022, Fitch Group’s research firm Creditsights had made almost a similar complaint against the Adani group.
On behalf of Adani Group, Group CFO Jugshindar Singh dismissed all the allegations and told news agencies that such a move smacks of a larger conspiracy just before the FPO hit the market without any attempt to communicate with the company. He claimed, “Without any attempt to verify the truth of this report, it has been published unilaterally. There is no substance to this allegation. Even in several courts of India, several such allegations have already been dismissed. We strongly condemn this baseless, despicable action.” doing.”
Similarly, a section of market experts are smelling the smell of larger corporate action behind the leak of such reports just before the FPO market. Notably, as of March 31, 2022, Adani Group’s total debt has increased by 40% to Rs 2.2 lakh crore. The Hindenburg Research Authority said in its report that seven out of seven Adani group companies have debt to equity ratio. Whereas Adani Green Energy’s debt to share price is 2,000%.