7 of 10 listed Adani companies get Sebi notices

Seven of the 10 listed Adani group companies have received show cause notices from markets regulator Sebi for alleged violations of various rules including disclosure & related party transaction norms. The companies that received the notices said that the notices have no material impact on their businesses.
The markets regulator sent notices to flagship Adani Enterprises, Adani Energy Solutions, Adani Green Energy, Adani Ports, Adani Power, Adani Total Gas and Adani Wilmar. If charges mentioned in the notices are proved, monetary or other penalties may follow. In all the seven companies, auditors qualified their reports after mentioning Sebi’s show cause notices. Neither the companies nor their auditors gave details of the charges mentioned in Sebi’s show cause notices.
The notices to the seven Adani companies are significant in the light of a Supreme Court-directed probe by the markets regulator that started about a year ago. In Jan 2023, US-based short-seller Hindenburg Research had alleged several cases of corporate malfeasance against Adani group companies. Allegations, which Adani group denied, included round tripping using offshore entities to inflate stock prices, cooking up books of accounts and several cases of non-disclosure. As a result, over the next five weeks, the group’s stocks were on a free fall, wiping out about 65% of the group’s total market value from a peak of £192 bn just a day before the report was published on Jan 24, 2023.
A case was filed in the Supreme Court, which then had asked Sebi to investigate the allegations made in the Hindenburg report. In Jan this year, the SC had passed its order in the investigation and had asked Sebi to complete two of the 24 issues it was looking into.