Shares in Indian conglomerate Adani tanked on Thursday after its industrialist owner, Gautam Adani, was charged by US prosecutors with paying more than $250 million in bribes for key contracts.
The painful losses at Adani Group units came as markets in most of Asia retreated as blockbuster earnings from chip titan Nvidia smashed forecasts but fell short of investor hopes. At the same time, bitcoin hit another record as it pushed towards the $100,000 mark.
Several listed subsidiaries of the Adani empire, which spans coal, airports, cement and media, collapsed in early trade, with some losing as much as 20 percent.
The charges are another blow to the firm, which was sent reeling last year when a bombshell report from US investment firm Hindenburg Research claimed the conglomerate had engaged in a "brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over decades".
The Adani Group called the allegations "baseless" on Thursday.
The conglomerate's flagship Adani Enterprises dived almost 20 percent, while several subsidiaries lost between 10 and 20 percent. However, Mumbai's Sensex index saw more limited losses, giving up around 0.6 percent.
All eyes had been on the release from Nvidia, which has been at the forefront of a global tech surge that has helped push some markets to multiple records owing to voracious demand for all things linked to artificial intelligence.
And once again, the firm topped expectations, announcing Wednesday that it made a $19 billion profit on record high revenue in the July-September quarter, while sales reached $35.1 billion -- about $2 billion more than estimated.
However, its shares fell in after-hours trade, even as chief executive Jensen Huang declared that the "age of AI is in full steam, propelling a global shift to Nvidia computing" and that its keenly anticipated Blackwell processing platform is in full production.
India's Adani Group on Thursday called US charges that their billionaire tycoon founder Gautam Adani had paid more than $250 million in bribes "baseless", as the opposition leader demanded his arrest.
The stiff denial came after shares in the industrialist's conglomerate nosedived more than 23 percent in Mumbai, the morning after a bombshell indictment in New York accused him of deliberately misleading international investors. Adani, once the world's second-richest man, is a close ally of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and critics have long accused him of improperly benefitting from their relationship.
"The allegations made by the US Department of Justice and the US Securities and Exchange Commission against directors of Adani Green are baseless and denied," the conglomerate said in a statement.
"All possible legal recourse will be sought," it added. But Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi said the businessmen should be taken into custody. "We demand that Adani be immediately arrested. But we know that won't happen as Modi is protecting him," Gandhi told reporters in New Delhi.
"Modi can't act even if he wants to, because he is controlled by Adani." Wednesday's indictment accuses Adani and multiple subordinates of paying huge sums of more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials for lucrative solar energy supply contracts. The deals were projected to generate more than $2 billion in profits after tax over roughly 20 years.
"All the projects we got have not been granted by any concession but through an independent and transparent auction system," he said. Modi's government has yet to comment on the charges but a spokesman for his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Amit Malviya, said the indictment appeared to implicate opposition parties rather than his own.
| "Don't get needlessly excited," Malviya wrote on X.
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