Tag: Adani Group

The Chairman’s Conflicts: How Adil Khawaja’s Boardroom Empire Compromised Safaricom’s Governance

When Adil Arshed Khawaja was elected chairman of Safaricom PLC’s board in early 2023, barely a hundred days after President William Ruto’s inauguration and only weeks after his own appointment as a non-executive director, the framing offered to the Kenyan public was one of merit.

Khawaja, the managing partner of Dentons Hamilton Harrison and Mathews, one of Kenya’s oldest and most prestigious law firms, had chaired KCB Bank Kenya, sat on the boards of Kenya Power and the Kenya Wildlife Service, and built a reputation as a safe pair of hands.

‘Any President will not give a stranger the chairmanship of Safaricom,’ Khawaja told the Daily Nation in September 2024, in one of the more candid admissions a sitting chairman of Kenya’s most valuable listed company has ever offered to a journalist. ‘I have the knowledge and experience chairing many big companies.’

What Khawaja did not say, but what the same interview inadvertently confirmed in granular detail, is that his appointment placed at the head of Safaricom’s boardroom table a man whose primary professional identity managing partner of a law firm representing the controversial Adani Group in litigation over the attempted takeover of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport sat in direct, structural tension with his fiduciary duties to Safaricom’s shareholders.

Two years on, with Safaricom now engulfed in a data surveillance scandal that international rights organisations say may have facilitated enforced disappearances, with customer trust eroding visibly enough that ordinary Kenyans are publicly asking on social media whether the company serves citizens or the state, and with a foreign shareholder poised to take majority control of the company partly because its existing governance has proven so opaque, the question of who Adil Khawaja has really been working for at Safaricom deserves a far more rigorous answer than the one he gave eighteen months ago.

The question of who Adil Khawaja has really been working for at Safaricom deserves a far more rigorous answer than the one he gave eighteen months ago.

THE MAN WHO CALLS HIMSELF ‘MR FIX IT’

Khawaja’s own words remain the single most damaging piece of evidence in this story, because they were not extracted under pressure.

They were offered voluntarily, in a phone interview, by a sitting chairman of a Nairobi Securities Exchange-listed company explaining his own utility to the head of state. Asked about his role accompanying President Ruto on foreign trips a habit so consistent that Khawaja has appeared on the President’s travelling delegation more often than most Cabinet Secretaries Khawaja did not deny being described as the President’s ‘Mr Fix It.’ Instead he explained the function approvingly.

‘When you see the President going on a trip, he is going to talk to investors to invest in our country. He must have people that can help to provide the necessary advice,’ he said. He went further, describing Ruto as ‘my close friend of more than 30 years,’ adding, with a lawyer’s precision, ‘our friendship goes way back between our families. But I am not the President’s personal lawyer.’

That last sentence is the crux of the matter. Khawaja is correct that he is not, formally, the President’s personal lawyer. He does not need to be.

He is the managing partner of the law firm that employs the President’s son, that represents the Adani Group in litigation over Kenya’s most contested infrastructure transaction in a generation, and that simultaneously advises Konvergenz Network Solutions, a company sitting inside a Safaricom-led consortium that Khawaja, as Safaricom’s chairman, has publicly defended.

The lines between ‘friend of the President,’ ‘managing partner of the President’s son’s employer,’ ‘lawyer for the company seeking the President’s airport,’ and ‘chairman of the listed company whose balance sheet is entangled with all three’ are not blurry because journalists have blurred them. They are blurry because Khawaja occupies all four positions at once.

THE ADANI WEB: JKIA, KETRACO, AND DENTONS HHM

The starting point for understanding Khawaja’s conflicts is the Adani Group’s attempted thirty-year, two-billion-dollar lease of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport a transaction so opaque and single-sourced that it triggered court petitions from the Kenya Human Rights Commission and the Law Society of Kenya, and a parliamentary committee hearing at which Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi was forced to articulate twenty-two conditions the government would impose on Adani before any deal could proceed.

Adani Airports Holdings Limited, the Adani Group subsidiary at the centre of the JKIA bid, retained Dentons Hamilton Harrison and Mathews Khawaja’s firm to defend it in the High Court case brought by KHRC and LSK. Khawaja did not deny this. He embraced it. ‘Adani is one of the biggest companies in the world,’ he told the Nation.

‘They are already running the Port in Tanzania and they want to expand across the East African region,’ a remark that reads less like a conflicted executive distancing himself from a controversial client and more like a business development pitch for future Adani-Dentons engagements.

Adani’s ambitions in Kenya were never confined to JKIA. The conglomerate was separately linked to a Sh95 billion contract with the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company, Ketraco, for high-voltage transmission infrastructure a deal that places Adani inside the same energy procurement ecosystem this publication has separately investigated in connection with Ketraco’s CEO recruitment irregularities.

The pattern that emerges is one in which a single Indian conglomerate, represented in Kenya by the law firm of Safaricom’s sitting chairman, was simultaneously pursuing the country’s largest airport concession, a nine-figure power transmission contract, and through an Abu Dhabi-linked holding structure a 59.55 percent stake in the consortium that won an $800 million government healthcare technology contract in which Safaricom itself holds a 22.56 percent stake.

THE SHIF CONFLICT: SAFARICOM IN BUSINESS WITH ADANI’S PARTNER

This is where the conflict stops being theoretical and becomes structural. The Integrated Healthcare Technology System, the digital backbone of President Ruto’s Social Health Insurance Fund programme, was awarded to a consortium in which Safaricom holds 22.56 percent, Konvergenz Network Solutions holds 17.89 percent, and Apeiro Limited holds 59.55 percent. Apeiro is a subsidiary of Sirius International Holding, an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm that is itself a subsidiary of International Holding Limited a corporate structure layered specifically, this publication’s sources in the corporate governance space note, to obscure beneficial ownership.

Sirius, critically, operates a joint venture with the Adani Group called Sirius Digitech Limited, which in mid-2024 acquired an Indian cloud computing firm, Coredge.io, in a deal both partners described as building a ‘sovereign AI and cloud platform.’

In other words, Safaricom the company Khawaja chairs entered an $800 million government contract as a minority partner alongside a firm, Apeiro, whose ultimate parent is in active joint-venture business with the Adani Group, the same Adani Group that Khawaja’s law firm represents in litigation against the Kenyan state over JKIA and that is separately pursuing the Ketraco transmission contract. Meanwhile, the third consortium member, Konvergenz, is represented in the SHIF deal by Dentons HHM Khawaja’s firm. Khawaja’s explanation, offered to the Nation, was that ‘we gave some preliminary advice to Konvergenz’ and that the SHIF programme predated his appointment as Safaricom chairman, having been initiated under former President Uhuru Kenyatta.

Both statements may be true. Neither resolves the conflict.

A chairman whose own law firm has an active client relationship with one party to a consortium his company has entered as a shareholder, where that consortium’s largest partner sits in a corporate web connected to a conglomerate his firm represents in litigation against the state, is not a chairman who can credibly claim to be exercising independent oversight on behalf of Safaricom’s minority shareholders.

A chairman whose own law firm has an active client relationship with a party to a consortium his company has entered as a shareholder is not exercising independent oversight on behalf of Safaricom’s minority shareholders.

NICK RUTO AND THE FAMILY BUSINESS OF GOVERNANCE

Layered onto this web is the employment of Nick Ruto, the President’s son and a qualified lawyer, at Dentons HHM the same firm, under Khawaja’s management, that represents Adani in the JKIA case. Khawaja’s defence of this arrangement, when pressed by the Nation, was procedural: ‘I didn’t even know that he had applied. We receive thousands of applications each year and he was one of the applicants, he went through the process and was selected.’ He further noted that the firm has previously employed other high-profile individuals.

Procedurally, this may well be accurate. Substantively, it is beside the point. The issue is not whether Nick Ruto’s hiring followed Dentons HHM’s standard recruitment process.

The issue is that the managing partner of the firm that employs the President’s son is simultaneously the chairman of the country’s most strategically important listed company, the President’s self-described travelling fixer, and a personal friend of three decades’ standing and that this entire arrangement sits atop a company, Safaricom, that handles the call records, location data, M-Pesa transaction histories, and digital lives of nearly fifty million Kenyans, data that the company has been accused of sharing with state security agencies implicated in abductions and killings.

When the chairman overseeing that company’s data governance has this many threads connecting him to the very state apparatus whose access to that data is the subject of international human rights concern, ‘I didn’t even know he had applied’ is not an answer to the governance question. It is a deflection from it.

RHINO CHARGE WHILE CUSTOMERS BURN

The texture of Khawaja’s priorities has not gone unnoticed by ordinary Safaricom customers, whose complaints about disappearing data bundles, dropped calls, malfunctioning 5G routers, and customer care channels that loop callers in circles without resolution have intensified publicly on social media even as the company’s PR machinery continues to promote its Ethiopian expansion, its M-Pesa revenue growth, and its sustainability credentials.

Kenyans on social media have pointedly noted that Khawaja’s public appearances alongside President Ruto extend beyond state investment trips into recreational territory, including the Rhino Charge, an off-road motorsport fundraiser for conservation in which Khawaja a longtime figure in Kenya’s wildlife conservation circles through his roles with the Rhino Ark Charitable Trust and the Kenya Wildlife Service has been a visible presence.

The juxtaposition is not merely rhetorical.

A chairman who has the time and inclination to accompany the head of state on overseas investment delegations and recreational motorsport events, while the company he chairs faces a deteriorating customer trust environment, an active data privacy scandal under High Court petition, and a looming change-of-control transaction that will determine the company’s leadership for a generation, is a chairman whose attention has visibly migrated away from the operational and governance failures piling up at Safaricom House.

THE PATTERN REPEATS: KCB AND KENYA POWER

This is not the first time Khawaja’s board career has intersected with institutions under public scrutiny.

He served eight years as a director of KCB Group between 2012 and 2020, the final four as chairman of KCB Bank Kenya a period that fell within the same banking sector this publication has separately documented for its pattern of fraud exposure across East Africa.

He also sat on the board of Kenya Power, departing in July 2020 as part of a broader reorganisation of the utility’s non-executive directors, a reorganisation that itself followed years of governance controversy at Kenya Power over procurement and tariff-setting irregularities.

The pattern across Khawaja’s board career is consistent: appointment to chair or direct large, strategically important, state-adjacent institutions, followed by periods of governance controversy during his tenure, followed by his continued public framing as a uniquely qualified boardroom operator notwithstanding those controversies.

WHAT THE VODACOM DEAL MEANS FOR KHAWAJA

The irony of Khawaja’s position is that the very Vodacom transaction this publication has previously examined under which Vodafone Kenya Limited will gain the power to nominate Safaricom’s next chief executive once Vodacom’s stake rises to 55 percent explicitly preserves a Kenyan chairmanship.

The shareholder agreement filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission states that VKL will ‘endeavour, insofar as possible’ to ensure the chairman is of Kenyan nationality, and the Kenyan government’s own December 2025 conditions go further, mandating that the chairman ‘shall at all times be’ a Kenyan citizen.

On the surface, this should protect Khawaja’s position even as the CEO’s office potentially returns to foreign-nominated hands.

But this protection cuts in an uncomfortable direction for Khawaja personally. If the chairmanship is the one senior position at Safaricom that remains insulated from Vodacom’s incoming oversight, then the chairman becomes, by default, the single most important check on whatever new CEO Vodafone Kenya nominates at precisely the moment when Safaricom’s data governance practices are under the heaviest international scrutiny in the company’s history, with Access Now and a coalition of global civil society organisations having written directly to Vodacom demanding an investigation into whether Safaricom facilitated human rights abuses through its data-sharing practices.

A chairman whose own professional and personal entanglements run as deep into the current administration’s commercial and family networks as Khawaja’s do is not obviously the independent check that moment requires.

If Vodacom’s new management is serious about resetting Safaricom’s governance culture as this publication has argued it must be the chairmanship cannot simply be treated as the safe, untouchable seat in the boardroom. It may, in fact, be the seat that most urgently needs fresh eyes.

THE QUESTION KHAWAJA AND NDEGWA CANNOT KEEP AVOIDING

Kenyans on social media have begun to ask, in increasingly pointed terms, why the loudest complaints about Safaricom on data privacy, on service quality, on customer care, on corporate arrogance have all intensified during the same period of leadership.

It is a fair question, and it deserves a fair answer, not from this publication, but from Khawaja and Ndegwa themselves, in public, under the same parliamentary scrutiny that Ndegwa has previously faced over the Vodacom transaction.

Specifically: how many data requests from security agencies has Safaricom received since the 2024 protests, how many carried court orders, how many were rejected, and who inside the company holds the authority to approve access to subscriber data? What internal safeguards exist when the agencies requesting that data are themselves the subject of credible allegations of enforced disappearance?

And, returning to the conflicts documented in this article, has Khawaja, as chairman, ever recused himself from any board discussion touching on Safaricom’s relationships with the Government of Kenya, given his firm’s representation of Adani, his firm’s employment of the President’s son, and his own description of his role as the President’s fixer?

If the answer to that last question is no, then the chairman of Kenya’s most powerful company has spent the most consequential two years of its modern history sitting at the head of the table with an undisclosed, unmanaged, and apparently unaddressed conflict of interest on virtually every matter where Safaricom’s commercial interests and the Kenyan state’s political interests intersect which, for a company that handles state surveillance requests, runs government health technology contracts, and is the subject of a change-of-control transaction requiring government approval, is to say: almost everything.

Safaricom’s customers built this company.

Its 65 percent market share, its M-Pesa dominance, its position as the most profitable company in East Africa all of it rests on the trust of nearly fifty million ordinary Kenyans who use its network every day for transactions that define their economic lives. That trust is not Adil Khawaja’s personal asset to leverage on behalf of a law firm’s client list, a presidential travel itinerary, or a family friendship of thirty years’ standing.

The silence from Safaricom’s boardroom on these questions, just as the silence on Ndegwa’s contract status, on the June 2024 internet outage, and on the surveillance allegations, is not discretion. It is an accumulating pattern of a board that has stopped treating accountability to the Kenyan public as a condition of its legitimacy.

June 15, 2026
Probe Reveals How Adani Group Manipulates Shares Through Secret Investments via Family Associates

February 17, 2026 | Nairobi, Kenya

They presented themselves as ordinary investors.

A businessman from the United Arab Emirates and a quiet executive from Taiwan, each with their own offshore shell companies, their own numbered bank accounts, their own carefully constructed layers of financial anonymity.

For more than a decade, Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli and Chang Chung-Ling moved billions of dollars through the secretive plumbing of the global financial system, buying and selling shares in the Indian conglomerate Adani Group.

What they did not disclose, and what investigators across three continents are now fighting to prove, is that they were not independent investors at all. They were, according to a growing body of international evidence, front men for the Adani family itself.

The full, staggering scale of that arrangement has now been laid bare for the first time.

Internal banking documents obtained by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, in partnership with the Financial Times and the Guardian, reveal that as recently as 2023, Ahli and Chang held approximately three billion dollars in Adani Group stock through a web of Bermuda-based hedge funds, routing the money through a Dubai subsidiary of Swiss banking giant REYL Intesa Sanpaolo.

The figure dwarfs any previously known estimate of their holdings and transforms what was already one of the most explosive corporate scandals in modern Indian history into something altogether more alarming.

“The prosecuting authority must have time to conduct its investigation. It should be noted that the appellant is clearly unable to provide explanations which it should be able to provide in order to dispel the doubts legitimately raised.” – Swiss Federal Criminal Court, August 2024

The revelations arrive at a moment of extraordinary legal peril for the Adani empire.

In November 2024, American federal prosecutors in New York indicted Adani Group founder Gautam Adani and his nephew on charges of orchestrating a scheme to pay over two hundred and fifty million dollars in bribes to Indian government officials, allegedly to secure lucrative solar energy contracts.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission filed a parallel civil complaint that remains ongoing.

In Switzerland, prosecutors have frozen more than three hundred and ten million dollars in assets linked to Chang, having opened a criminal investigation into allegations of money laundering and document forgery as far back as 2021, a full two years before the world learned of the Hindenburg Research exposé that initially rocked markets and wiped over a hundred and fifty billion dollars from Adani’s stock valuation.

THE MEN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

The story of how Ahli and Chang became entwined with one of the world’s most powerful conglomerates stretches back more than fifteen years and runs through some of the darkest chapters in the Adani Group’s history.

Both men surfaced in not one but two separate Indian government investigations into alleged wrongdoing by the conglomerate, and both cases were eventually dismissed under circumstances that critics say raise profound questions about regulatory independence in India.

The first arose from a 2007 investigation by India’s Directorate of Revenue Intelligence into an allegedly illegal diamond trading scheme.

Investigators from the DRI, the premier financial crime agency under the Ministry of Finance, described Chang as a director of three Adani companies involved in the operation, while Ahli represented a trading firm also implicated in the scheme.

That inquiry also produced a particularly striking detail: Chang shared a residential address in Singapore with Vinod Adani, the notoriously low-profile elder brother of Gautam Adani, the Group’s billionaire founder and chairman.

The second investigation, launched in 2014, alleged that Adani Group companies had been illegally siphoning money out of India by artificially inflating invoices for imported power generation equipment, potentially to the tune of one billion dollars.

Once again, the names of Ahli and Chang appeared.

At separate points in time, both men served as directors of two companies later owned by Vinod Adani that were allegedly used to handle the proceeds of the scheme, one registered in the United Arab Emirates and one in Mauritius. Both cases collapsed without convictions, but the pattern they established would prove difficult to escape.

“The question of whether this arrangement is a violation of the law rests on whether Ahli and Chang should be considered to be acting on behalf of Adani promoters.” – OCCRP Investigation, 2023

Documents later obtained by OCCRP and shared with its media partners showed that from at least 2013 onwards, Ahli and Chang were channeling enormous sums of money into Adani Group shares through a series of offshore structures of extraordinary complexity.

The money passed through at least four companies, flowed into a Bermuda-based vehicle called the Global Opportunities Fund, and was then deployed through two Mauritius-registered investment funds to acquire shares in Adani Enterprises, Adani Ports, Adani Power, and Adani Transmission. At the peak of their investments in June 2016, the two funds controlled by the pair held between eight and fourteen percent of the free-floating shares in each of those four companies.

Under Indian securities law, publicly listed companies must maintain at least twenty-five percent of their shares in genuine public hands to prevent price manipulation. If Ahli and Chang were acting on behalf of the Adani promoter group, their combined holdings would have pushed insider ownership well above the legal ceiling.

THE SWISS BANK CONFESSION

It was the Hindenburg Research report, published in January 2023, that first forced the hidden architecture of this arrangement into the open.

The American short seller accused the Adani Group of engineering what it called the largest con in corporate history through brazen stock manipulation, sending Adani’s share prices into freefall and triggering a loss of over a hundred and fifty billion dollars in market value within days.

The Adani Group issued a four-hundred-and-thirteen page rebuttal, dismissed the report as a calculated attack on India, and maintained that its operations were fully transparent and compliant with all applicable laws.

But behind the scenes, something more consequential was happening. At REYL Intesa Sanpaolo’s Dubai subsidiary, compliance officers were quietly conducting their own investigation.

The Italy-based parent group, Fideuram Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking, launched an internal review to identify any accounts connected to the Adani Group.

What they found shook them enough to summon Ahli and Chang to an emergency meeting.

In February 2023, with the CEO and a board member of Reyl MEA present, both men signed a written statement acknowledging that the accounts were theirs and confirming that they had invested in Adani stock because of personal and professional relationships with members of the Adani family, whom they trusted as businessmen.

They denied any wrongdoing and promised to diversify their holdings in the short term. The bank responded by freezing any further transactions on the accounts without specific sign-off from its anti-money laundering officers.

The three accounts identified at Reyl MEA were staggering in their scale.

Ahli held two point zero two billion dollars through his British Virgin Islands company, Gulf Asia Trade and Investment Ltd, almost entirely invested in hedge funds described in the bank’s own internal documents as likely invested in Adani Group companies. Chang held one point zero two billion dollars through his BVI company, Lingo Investment Ltd, in funds described as probably invested in the same conglomerate.

Vinod Adani himself held a comparatively modest six point five million dollars through a UAE-registered company, with bank records noting small loan-related transactions between his account and Chang’s.

Those three Bermuda-registered hedge funds, identified in Fideuram’s investigation as Gleneagles Investment Fund, Pangea Fund, and Oyster Bay Fund, were administered by a single firm, Apex Fund Services.

Two of the three, Pangea and Oyster Bay, were managed by Elara Capital Ltd, a firm that also ran two other funds with reported concentrated positions in Adani stock: the Elara India Opportunities Fund and the Vespera Fund.

REGULATORS ON TRIAL

The question of whether India’s own institutions were willing or able to investigate the Adani Group has become as controversial as the underlying allegations.

The country’s securities regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, was already examining the conglomerate when the Hindenburg report was published. After the report’s release, India’s Supreme Court directed SEBI to broaden its inquiry and appointed an independent six-member expert committee to assist the court in evaluating the affair.

That committee delivered a finding that would itself become a subject of fierce debate: it found no evidence of regulatory failure by SEBI, but simultaneously acknowledged that the regulator had drawn a blank on the ultimate owners of certain offshore entities, meaning it could not reach conclusive findings on whether insider ownership had breached legal limits.

In January 2024, the Supreme Court declined to remove the investigation from SEBI, noting the regulator had completed twenty-two of its twenty-four separate lines of inquiry and expressing confidence in its work.

In September 2025, SEBI issued its long-awaited final orders in relation to two specific sets of transactions flagged by Hindenburg, finding those particular allegations not established.

Reuters, citing sources with direct knowledge, reported at the same time that more than a dozen other cases were still pending.

SEBI has never published a comprehensive report on the totality of its investigations, leaving enormous questions unresolved and beyond public scrutiny.

That regulatory silence has grown only louder in the context of an August 2024 revelation that proved particularly damaging.

Hindenburg Research published a second report, this one targeting the SEBI chairperson herself, Madhabi Puri Buch, alleging that she and her husband had previously held investments in some of the very offshore funds at the centre of the Adani inquiry.

Both Buch and her husband denied the allegations emphatically. The report sent Adani’s shares tumbling again, erasing billions in value before a partial recovery. SEBI did not open a public inquiry into the allegations against its own leadership.

A GLOBAL WEB OF SCRUTINY

While India’s domestic legal machinery has moved slowly and inconclusively, other jurisdictions have proven less reluctant to act.

Swiss prosecutors launched their criminal investigation into Chang in December 2021, more than a year before the Hindenburg report was published and before the wider world had begun to understand the alleged architecture of what was happening inside the Adani Group. The Swiss Federal Criminal Court, in an August 2024 ruling, rejected an appeal by Chang’s company to unfreeze the three hundred and eleven million dollars seized from his five Swiss bank accounts. The court’s language was pointed. It noted that Chang’s company had proved unable to provide the explanations and supporting documents that it should have been able to produce to dispel the legitimate doubts raised by prosecutors.

According to the internal banking report obtained by OCCRP, Swiss judicial authorities had sent specific information requests to REYL Intesa Sanpaolo about accounts held by Ahli, Chang, and Vinod Adani even before the Hindenburg report detonated.

The bank subsequently filed suspicious transaction reports with the Swiss Financial Intelligence Unit covering all three individuals. Those earlier accounts had been closed at the end of 2022 for inactivity and were separate from the three-billion-dollar accounts later uncovered.

In the United States, the indictment of Gautam Adani himself on bribery and fraud charges in November 2024 represented the most dramatic single escalation of the legal pressure on the group since the Hindenburg controversy began.

Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York alleged that Adani and his nephew had conspired to pay over two hundred and fifty million dollars in bribes to Indian government officials in exchange for solar energy supply contracts that would generate two billion dollars in profits. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed its civil case in parallel.

The Adani Group has called the accusations baseless and vowed to pursue every available legal remedy.

THE ADANI RESPONSE

The Adani Group’s official position has remained consistent and unambiguous throughout years of mounting allegations.

A spokesperson, responding to inquiries from OCCRP, stated that under Indian law a listed company neither controls nor directs who purchases its publicly traded shares, and that it has no visibility into the source of funds of public shareholders beyond what regulators require to be disclosed.

Any suggestion that promoter shareholding has been misstated or concealed is incorrect and contrary to the group’s regulatory disclosures, the spokesperson maintained.

The allegations from the Hindenburg report, the spokesperson added, have been adequately addressed and examined at the highest levels of India’s regulatory and judicial framework, including by the Supreme Court.

The Adani portfolio of companies, the statement concluded, remains fully compliant with all laws and disclosure requirements across all jurisdictions.

Ahli and Chang did not respond to requests for comment from OCCRP.

Intesa Sanpaolo’s representative stated that the bank was not in a position to comment, citing legal restrictions on disclosure in Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and Switzerland.

The Swiss Federal Prosecutor’s Office, asked about the status of its criminal investigation, confirmed that a probe into money laundering and forgery of documents was underway but declined to comment on any named individual.

THE LARGER QUESTION

What the new banking documents ultimately expose is not merely the scale of a shadow investment operation but the extraordinary durability of the structures that enabled it.

The offshore holding companies, the Bermuda hedge funds, the layers of BVI shell entities and Dubai subsidiaries, the Mauritius vehicles and the Singapore addresses: all of it held together for more than a decade, surviving government investigations in India, regulatory scrutiny in Switzerland, and a global media storm that would have collapsed less carefully engineered arrangements.

The two men at the centre of it acknowledged their holdings to their own bankers, explained them as a matter of personal trust in a powerful family, and promised to diversify. The promise, investigators now suggest, was not kept.

For a conglomerate that controls airports and ports, mines and data centres, power plants and media assets across one of the world’s fastest-growing economies,

the consequences of what Swiss, American, and Indian investigators are examining could not be more consequential. The question that hangs over every hearing, every frozen account, and every unanswered regulatory order is the same one it has always been: how much of what the world believed to be a public company was, in fact, a private empire in disguise?

This investigation draws on reporting by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), the Financial Times, the Guardian, and Kenya Insights’ own research. The Adani Group, Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli, and Chang Chung-Ling were offered the opportunity to comment. Allegations remain subject to ongoing legal proceedings in multiple jurisdictions. No verdict of guilt has been returned against any party named in this report.

February 17, 2026
Kenya To Pay Adani Group Billions As Compensation For Contract Cancellation

The Kenyan government finds itself trapped in a financial quagmire as it scrambles to negotiate a compensation package with India’s Adani Group following the dramatic cancellation of a Sh96 billion electricity transmission deal that has turned into a taxpayer nightmare.

Treasury’s Public-Private Partnership Directorate has confirmed that delicate negotiations are underway to determine how much Kenyans will fork out to compensate the Indian conglomerate after President William Ruto verbally cancelled the 30-year contract in November last year without issuing formal termination papers.

The government is now walking a financial tightrope, desperately seeking what it calls a mutual separation agreement to avoid the crushing costs of formal contract termination, which legal experts estimate could saddle taxpayers with at least Sh5 billion in compensation.

Documents reveal that Kenya has deliberately avoided issuing formal termination notices because it favours the less costly route of a negotiated settlement, a move that exposes the country’s vulnerability in dealing with powerful multinational corporations.

The cancelled deal would have seen Adani Energy Solutions construct critical power infrastructure including a 206-kilometre transmission line from Gilgil to Konza and substations that were meant to boost electricity supply around Nairobi and extend high-voltage power to previously underserved areas.

Under the original contract signed in October last year, the Adani Group was positioned to rake in a staggering Sh634 billion over three decades before handing over the infrastructure to Kenya. This translates to Sh21.2 billion in annual revenues that would have been extracted from Kenyan households through a controversial wheeling charge added to monthly electricity bills.

President Ruto ordered the hasty cancellation after Adani Group founder Gautam Adani and his nephew Sagar were indicted by United States authorities on bribery and fraud charges.

American prosecutors alleged the billionaire duo paid bribes to secure power supply contracts and deliberately misled investors during fundraising activities.

But in a stunning twist that has complicated Kenya’s position, the election of President Donald Trump has dramatically shifted the political landscape. Trump’s administration has shown willingness to entertain representations from Adani officials seeking dismissal of the criminal charges. Trump even paused prosecutions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the very law that formed the backbone of the case against the Indian billionaire.

This softening of America’s stance has emboldened the Adani Group and weakened Kenya’s negotiating position, forcing Nairobi into what sources describe as uncomfortable discussions about compensation for a deal that was cancelled over corruption allegations.

The PPP unit has remained tight-lipped about the progress of negotiations, with Director-General Kefa Seda deflecting questions to the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company, the state agency that originally contracted Adani. This silence has only deepened concerns about transparency in the settlement talks.

Legal experts warn that Kenya’s position is precarious because there are no extraordinary grounds in the project agreement that would justify unilateral termination without compensation.

Lawyers intimate that Adani could push for significantly higher payouts given the lack of concrete evidence directly linking the Kenya project to the American indictment.

The Adani saga adds to Kenya’s growing graveyard of cancelled contracts that have already cost taxpayers dearly.

The government paid Israeli firm SBI International Holdings Sh6.19 billion for contract breaches, shelled out Sh8.9 billion to Chinese contractors over the cancelled JKIA second terminal, and recently agreed to compensate French contractors Sh6.2 billion for terminating a Sh190 billion roads project.

This pattern of cancellations followed by massive compensation payments has raised serious questions about the competence of government officials in contract negotiations and the wisdom of entering into agreements without proper due diligence.

The Adani deal itself was shrouded in controversy from the start, with city law firm IC Law LLP unsuccessfully demanding disclosure of competing bidders and financial health details of the Adani subsidiary.

Questions about the adequacy of public participation and the quality of legal advice from the Attorney-General’s office remain unanswered.

As negotiations drag on, Kenyans are left wondering how much they will ultimately pay for a project that was cancelled before a single metre of transmission line was erected, adding another costly chapter to the country’s troubled history of infrastructure deals gone wrong.

October 24, 2025
Whistleblower Claims Kenya In Talks With Dubai Firm Linked To Controversial Adani For JKIA Lease Deal

Nelson Amenya, the whistleblower who exposed the contentious 2024 deal between the Kenyan government and India’s Adani Group over Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA), has reignited public debate with new allegations.

Amenya claims that the Kenyan government is negotiating to transfer control of JKIA, East Africa’s largest aviation hub, to a Dubai-based firm with possible connections to the Adani Group.

The 30-year-old activist, currently studying in France, further asserts that the deal would use Kenyan taxpayers as a sovereign guarantee, raising concerns about transparency and fiscal responsibility.

Amenya’s latest statements, suggest that the Kenyan government is engaging with an unnamed Middle Eastern company to lease JKIA.

He speculates that the Adani Group—previously involved in a now-canceled $1.85 billion airport deal—may be involved through a Dubai-based entity.

“The Kenyan government is planning to give the airport to some company in Dubai (being a tax haven, it could be Adani behind it) and will use the country’s balance sheet as a sovereign guarantee,” Amenya stated, questioning the legitimacy of the arrangement.

“If a company has the money and they believe the airport is a worthy investment, why would they need taxpayers to underwrite the deal?”

The timing of Amenya’s claims coincides with Kenya’s recent acquisition of a Ksh193 billion ($1.5 billion) loan from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) at an 8.2% interest rate, expected to be disbursed in February 2025.

This financial agreement has prompted speculation about potential connections to the alleged airport deal, particularly given Dubai’s status as a financial hub.
Social media has been abuzz with many suggesting that a “makeshift proxy company linked with Adani” in Dubai could be positioned to take over JKIA.

Amenya’s earlier exposé in July 2024 revealed negotiations between the Kenyan government and Adani Airport Holdings Limited for a 30-year lease of JKIA.

The proposed $2 billion deal, which included refurbishing terminals and building a new runway, was criticized for its lack of transparency and competitive bidding.

Documents leaked by Amenya showed that Adani sought an 18% equity stake in JKIA even after the lease period, control over airport fees, and tax exemptions, prompting widespread public concern.

The deal was halted by the High Court in September 2024 and officially canceled by President William Ruto in November 2024, following a U.S. federal indictment of Adani Group directors for alleged bribery.

The whistleblower’s actions have earned him both acclaim and challenges.

Praised by many Kenyans—some on social media even proposed renaming JKIA “Nelson Amenya International Airport”—he has faced significant personal risks.

Amenya, who has been studying in France since the initial exposé, claims to have received threats and states that the Directorate of Criminal Investigations has made accusations about his carbon credit firm.

“If you are in Kenya, you will be targeted by the police, by mercenaries, you might even lose your life,” he told AFP in October 2024.

The Kenyan government has not yet responded directly to Amenya’s latest allegations.

In 2024, officials, including government spokesperson Isaac Mwaura, maintained that JKIA was not for sale and that Adani’s proposal was under review with safeguards to protect national interests.

However, the Kenya Airports Authority (KAA) faced criticism for reportedly approving Adani’s initial proposal quickly, with questions raised about adherence to Kenya’s Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Act requirements for an open tender process.

Critics argue that JKIA, which reportedly generates revenue equivalent to 5% of Kenya’s GDP, is too strategically important to be leased under unclear terms.

While the 2024 deal’s cancellation was viewed by many as a victory for public advocacy, Amenya’s new claims suggest ongoing concerns about transparency.

May 15, 2025
EXILED? ‘I Can’t Return to Kenya After Exposing Adani Scandal—Maybe Only When Ruto Goes,’ Whistleblower Amenya Tells Bloomberg

Nelson Amenya, a a renowned whistleblower and digital activist, says he cannot return to Kenya after exposing a controversial $2 billion airport deal involving India’s Adani Group.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Amenya linked his safety concerns to President William Ruto’s administration, stating, “I can’t return to Kenya after exposing the Adani scandal—maybe only when Ruto goes.”

Amenya, once an implementing manager at Carrefour’s Kenyan franchise, blew the whistle on the proposed 30-year lease of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) to the Adani Group in July 2023.

The deal, which he exposed via a tweet that garnered over a million views, promised modernization but was criticized for its lack of transparency and plans to slash jobs.

Public outrage and Amenya’s revelations triggered a chain of events that led to its initial cancellation.

However, the victory came at a steep personal cost. “I’ve received threats that will keep me out of Kenya for the foreseeable future,” Amenya told Bloomberg.

He believes these threats stem from powerful figures tied to the deal, which had early backing from President Ruto’s government.

“So many people have been killed, kidnapped—some found alive, some dead—for small things like posting criticisms online,” he said, underscoring the risks he faces.

The Adani deal resurfaced in 2024, only to face legal challenges and protests.

In September, the Kenyan High Court suspended it, and airport workers took to the streets, chanting “Adani must go,” causing flight disruptions.

On November 21, 2024, President Ruto canceled the deal—along with a $736 million energy contract with Adani—following US indictments against the conglomerate’s founder, Gautam Adani, for fraud.

Despite this, Amenya remains wary, suggesting his exile may persist until Ruto, who assumed office in September 2022, leaves power.

“I really love my country,” Amenya said, reflecting on his motivation. A self-described patriot, he aimed to use his education to combat Kenya’s “tribal and kingpin politics.”

His journey took a pivotal turn during the 2023 protests against a contentious finance bill, when a government source tipped him off about the airport deal via X.

“After seeing my fellow Kenyans dying on the street, I thought, ‘If these people paid the ultimate price, the least I could do is expose this,’” he recounted.

The fallout has been bittersweet.

While Amenya’s actions may have inspired a generation to demand accountability, he now lives in limbo, unable to return home.

“Of course, I will go back to Kenya—it may be after this government is out of power,” he told Bloomberg, hinting at a long wait given Ruto’s term could extend to 2032 (since he plans to seek reelection in 2027) unless political shifts occur sooner.

Critics, including the Law Society of Kenya, had slammed the deal as a threat to national interests. Ruto’s eventual reversal came amid international pressure, but for Amenya, it hasn’t erased the personal risks tied to his whistleblowing.

As of now, Amenya’s future remains uncertain.

His story is a stark reminder of the high stakes faced by those who challenge power in Kenya—and the enduring hope that political change might one day pave the way for his return.

April 7, 2025
The Student Who Blew Whistle On Kenya Airport Controversy

Kenyan business student Nelson Amenya has been hailed as a hero by those campaigning for greater transparency in the deals his government makes with private firms.

Recent Kenyan history is littered with stories of huge contracts that have resulted from corruption – and despite laws that are supposed to prevent this from happening, there are suspicions that it continues to take place.

Thirty-year-old Mr Amenya, who is studying in France for an MBA, leaked details on social media of what he said was a proposed agreement between Kenya and the Adani Group, an Indian multinational, in July.

It concerned the management of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) – the country’s – and region’s – biggest airport, which is long overdue a complete overhaul.

“The first feeling I had [when I was passed the documents] was that it was just another government deal… I did not understand the magnitude or the seriousness of it,” Mr Amenya, whose profile as an anti-corruption activist had been on the rise, tells the BBC.

The documents detailed a $2bn (£1.6bn) proposal by the Adani Group to lease JKIA for 30 years in order to modernise and run it.

As he started to go through the papers, he felt that if it was to go ahead, it “was going to hurt the Kenyan economy” while all the benefit would go to the Indian multinational.

The deal appeared unfair to him, according to what he read, as Kenya would still be putting in the largest share of the money but not reaping the financial rewards.

Mr Amenya had good reason to think the papers were genuine as “the people who were giving me these documents were from very legitimate departments of government”, he says.

The Adani Group is involved in infrastructure, mining and energy projects globally, in countries such as Israel, the UAE, France, Tanzania, Australia and Greece. Its founder Gautam Adani is a big player in India’s economy and is a close ally of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Through further reading, Mr Amenya says he discovered that the Adani deal with Kenya could have left his country with an obligation to pay the company if it did not recoup its investment.

“This was a great breach of trust of the people by the leadership of the president, the Kenya Airports Authority, the minister – they all betrayed the people,” he alleges.

Despite the evidence in his hands, Mr Amenya wrestled with what to do next. His own safety was at risk, though being in France he was better off than being in Kenya, where anti-corruption activists have been targeted and some killed.

“I was a bit scared. I didn’t know what’s going to happen. I’m risking my career, I’m risking my life, why should I take the risk to do this?” he asked himself at the time.

However, in the end he felt that staying quiet was not an option.

“You know, it’s only cowards who live long.”

After spending weeks going through what he had been sent, Mr Amenya leaked the documents on his X page in July, immediately sparking outrage in Kenya.

JKIA airport workers went on strike demanding that the deal be scrapped.

Airport workers at JKIA went on strike after Nelson Amenya released details of the alleged deal

“It felt like a duty for me, for my country. Even if I am far away, I still have a duty for my country. I want to see a better Kenya, my home country becoming developed, industrialised and an end to corruption.”

He worried that the airport deal was a harbinger of what might come next.

Mr Amenya says it was not just the unusual terms and lack of transparency that rang alarm bells, it was also, he alleges, that Kenyan laws appeared to have been systematically ignored.

“[The authorities] never did due diligence for this company… they did not follow the due process of procurement.”

He alleges that some government officials hoped to bypass the legal requirements, including public consultation, that are supposed to prevent taxpayers’ money from being misspent.

A report in April by the Kenya Airports Authority on the proposed deal highlighted that there was no plan to consult stakeholders on the plan.

“This was in April, and by July when I was exposing this, they had not done any public participation. It was quite secret this deal, and by that time they were just a month away from signing the deal,” Mr Amenya alleges.

“After I exposed this deal is when they hurriedly tried to come and do like a sham public participation – they called the Kenya Airports Authority staff and started to have stakeholder meetings.”

Various officials and branches of the state denied allegations of corruption in the process and the authorities went ahead to sign another multimillion dollar deal with the Adani Group – this time to construct power lines.

The Adani Group said Mr Amenya’s claims were baseless and malicious.

A spokesperson told the BBC that “the proposal was submitted following Kenyan Public Private Partnership regulations and was intended to create a world class airport and significantly enhance the Kenyan economy by creating numerous new jobs”.

The Adani Group further says that no contract was signed as “discussions did not progress to a binding agreement”.

The company also says the proposal for the energy deal was above board and that the company “categorically refutes all allegations and insinuations of any violation of Kenyan laws in our operations or proposals.

“Every project we undertake is governed by a strong commitment to compliance, transparency and the laws of the respective countries in which we operate,” the statement read.

But it was not Mr Amenya’s leak that actually changed the government’s mind.

It was only when the US authorities indicted Gautam Adani for alleged involvement in a $250m (£200m) bribery scheme that Kenya acted.

Representatives from the Adani Group denied the allegations from US prosecutors and called them “baseless”.

At a state-of-the-nation address in parliament last month, Kenya’s President William Ruto announced the cancellation of both Adani deals.

“In the face of undisputed evidence or credible information on corruption, I will not hesitate to take decisive action,” Ruto said in a speech met with loud cheers inside parliament.

Kenyans celebrated the decision which Ruto attributed to new information provided by investigative agencies and partner nations.

“I was in class when this announcement came. I couldn’t believe it,” Mr Amenya says.

“I think in the first one hour, I had tears in my eyes. I was so happy.”

Although he does not see himself as a hero, messages of support poured in from everywhere, including from India.

Forty minutes after the class ended, he posted his now-famous tweet “Adios Adani!!” – goodbye Adani.

“It was momentous… All that I did finally paid off.”

The feeling of triumph, however, came after months of personal struggle and pressure.

Soon after exposing the airport deal, Mr Amenya was sued for defamation by an Adani Group representative and a Kenyan politician, making him question whether he should continue.

“Some people were coming to me from the government, they were even ready to pay me, they were telling me: ‘You need to cash out and just stop this fight with the government,’” he recalls.

“It would have been the biggest mistake of my life to give up, a betrayal to the Kenyan people.”

But even after scrapping the deals, President Ruto still questions why Kenyans opposed this and many other projects he has championed. He says he will find a way to upgrade the airport.

“I saw them saying that those who stopped the upgrading of our airport are heroes. Heroes? What do you gain when you stop the building of an airport in your country?” Ruto asked at a public function in early December.

“You have no clue how it’s going to be built, and those who are opposed have never even stepped foot inside an airport, you just want to oppose.”

Mr Amenya, who is still facing the defamation cases, is now fundraising to help with his legal fees, and says his future in Kenya is uncertain.

“I have received threats from credible intelligence agencies and people in Kenya that have warned me not to go back because obviously there’s some people who are very angry with what I did,” he says.

A hefty price, but one Mr Amenya says he would gladly pay again.

“We don’t really need to wait for someone to save us,” he says.

December 20, 2024
TotalEnergies Stops Business With Adani After US Bribery Charges

(Reuters) – French oil major TotalEnergies halted on Monday investments into Adani Group, after the Indian ports-to-power conglomerate was engulfed in a crisis over an alleged multi-million-dollar bribery scheme.

The move is the first major fallout from U.S. authorities’ decision to charge Adani’s billionaire chairman Gautam Adani and seven other people with agreeing to pay around $265 million in bribes to Indian government officials.

TotalEnergies, whose financial exposure to Adani firms is estimated at between $4 billion and $5 billion by analysts at Bernstein Research, said it had not been made aware of the investigation into the alleged corruption scheme.

While TotalEnergies’ plans for future investment in Adani Group firms were not known, the announcement of a pause adds to the criticism the $143-billion Indian conglomerate is facing about disclosure standards, which may lead to closer scrutiny by other investors.

“Until such time when the accusations against the Adani group individuals and their consequences have been clarified, TotalEnergies will not make any new financial contribution as part of its investments in the Adani group of companies,” the French company said.

TotalEnergies, which has a 20% stake and a seat on the board of the company at the centre of the case, Adani Green Energy Ltd, said it rejects corruption in any form.

The U.S. prosecutors’ bribery charges related to alleged payments to obtain contracts that could yield $2 billion of profit over 20 years. The charges also included making misleading statements to the public despite being made aware of the U.S. investigation in 2023.

The Adani Group has said the accusations as well as those levelled by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a parallel civil case are baseless and that it will seek “all possible legal recourse”.

Adani did not immediately respond to a request for comment on TotalEnergies’ statement.

Shares of Adani Green Energy plunged more than 11% on Monday after the TotalEnergies statement before recovering to close 7.9% lower, while Adani Total Gas l, in which the French company owns a 37.4% stake, ended down 1.4%.

India’s parliament was suspended on Monday after disruption by lawmakers demanding a discussion on the allegations while the crisis continued to hurt the group founded by Adani, 62, one of the world’s richest people.

On Sunday, a U.S. development agency said it was reviewing the impact of the bribery allegations on its agreement to lend more than $550 million to a Sri Lankan port development backed by the Adani group.

The agency said that no funds have yet been disbursed under the loan commitment.

PARLIAMENT DISRUPTED

The Adani group’s projects and businesses span the globe and some of them have come under the spotlight since the indictment in the U.S.

Last week, Kenyan President William Ruto cancelled a procurement process that had been expected to award control of the country’s main airport to Adani.

In Bangladesh, a panel examining power generation contracts, including one with Adani Power l, urged the interim government to hire a global legal firm to ensure a thorough and transparent investigation into previous deals.

In India, opposition parties, who have consistently targeted Adani for what they say is his proximity to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, disrupted both houses of parliament seeking a discussion on the Adani allegations.

“The first step the government should take is to have a detailed discussion on the Adani saga which has the potential of tarnishing India’s image at the global stage,” Mallikarjun Kharge, president of the main opposition Congress party, posted on X.

Jagdeep Dhankhar, the Vice President of India and the chairman of the upper house, said he had received 13 notices from lawmakers demanding a discussion on the Adani issue but he could not allow them as they did not conform to the rules.

Dhankhar suspended the chamber for the day as lawmakers insisted on their demand, with similar scenes playing out in the lower house.

Indian opposition parties have in the past accused Modi’s government of protecting Gautam Adani and his businesses, charges both deny.

Modi’s opponents say he has longstanding ties with Adani, going back nearly two decades to when Modi was chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, from where Adani also comes.

They accuse the government of favouring the group in business deals, charges the government has rejected as “wild allegations”.

The government has not commented on the indictment but Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has said that it is for the Adani Group to deal with and defend itself and that the law will take its course.

MIXED DAY FOR ADANI STOCKS

Outside parliament, dozens of members and supporters of the youth wing of Congress marched in protest, carrying placards demanding Adani’s arrest and shouting slogans linking him to Modi.

The crisis is the second in two years to hit the Adani group, which was last year accused by short seller Hindenburg Research of improperly using offshore tax havens. The company denied those claims.

The disruption in parliament came as investors cut their exposure to the conglomerate, depressing Adani dollar bond prices.

In Asian trade on Monday, some of the most liquid debts, issued by Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone fell between 1 cent and 2 cents, with similar selling in Adani Transmission debt.

November 26, 2024
Behind Scenes: How The U.S. Forced Ruto To Cancel Deals With Adani In The Last Minute

President William Ruto’s decision to cancel the deeply unpopular multi-billion-shilling airport and power transmission deals with troubled Indian conglomerate Adani Group took many by surprise. But it had been long in coming, sources say.

A defiant ruling elite faced with months of spirited public opposition fought to defend the controversial agreements till the last minute, but enormous pressure by authorities in the United States of America after a decisive action to indict Adani companies’ top executives over massive bribery forced the President’s hand.

We’ve learnt that a confluence of factors, including doubts about Adani’s financial injection of only 30 per cent of overall funding required to refurbish, pressure from foreign partners over Jomo Kenyatta International Airport’s security considerations, and an increasingly hostile public with dire political ramifications, forced the rethink.

Integrity issues

Sources confirmed that Kenya was facing intense pressure from development partners over the leasing out of JKIA, the official gateway to the region, to an Indian firm facing integrity concerns, especially in the wake of geopolitical upheaval, including the Russia-Ukraine and Israeli-Palestinian wars.

President Ruto, too, has been under a lot of pressure from Kenyans, the opposition and the clergy, who described the Privately Initiated Partnership with Adani as auctioning off major national assets to a foreign entity.

Then bang: Billionaire Gautam Adani alongside six company executives are charged in New York for allegedly masterminding a bribery and fraud scheme to secure solar power contracts worth Sh260 billion ($2 billion) in future profits! This offered the President an opportunity to reverse the controversial deals and win back some support at home.

The US Department of Justice alleged that Adani and his associates paid over Sh32 billion ($250 million) in bribes to Indian officials while misleading banks and investors in the United States.

“This indictment alleges schemes to pay over $250 million in bribes, deceive financial institutions, and obstruct justice,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lisa Miller said in a statement.

The US Department of Justice claimed that Adani personally engaged with Indian officials to execute the fraudulent deals, supported by evidence from documents and phone records.

Adani has denied all charges, dismissing them as baseless.

Ruto’s calculation, therefore, is that the cancellation, while projecting him as a listening president, would offer him a chance to win plaudits from Kenyans while placating foreign partners.

Insiders say that after Adani’s indictment in the United States and the fall of the group’s shares in global markets, the Kenyan government was unsure if the Indian conglomerate still had the 30 per cent counterpart funds and the wherewithal to raise the balance from international financiers to finance the projects.

Corruption perception

“There was also fear that the projects would suffer integrity issues, tainting the image of the country and government,” a Treasury official intimated.

“We doubted Adani’s ability to finance these projects given his 30 per cent commitment. Allowing him to proceed would only reinforce perceptions of corruption in Kenya,” another senior government official said.

Also considered by the Kenya government were fears of losing critical infrastructure in the event of default after being used as collateral by Adani to raise funds from international lenders. Concerns grew over what would happen to the collateral if Adani, facing mounting fraud allegations, went bankrupt.

“I have directed agencies within the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum to immediately cancel the ongoing procurement,” President Ruto, who attributed the decision to new information provided by investigative agencies and partner nations, said.

Investigations has since established that the government had not yet signed the airport leasing deal, and therefore will unlikely attract any compensation.

According to an earlier Heads and Terms document to the Kenyan authorities by Adani, any termination of the contract would have forced the government to pay any developments as well as losses incurred by Adani at the time of termination. And failure to do so would have dragged Kenya to arbitration courts outside the country.

“Kenyans are not going to pay for terminating the contract because we have a clause on integrity and corruption, which allows us to pull out,” a State House official said.

But it is instructive that any integrity and bribery charges against Adani are yet to be proven in court.

“Adani and his team are already facing charges in the US, and it would be reckless to proceed when most of the financing comes from international banks. If the company collapses, we risk losing crucial infrastructure, which will comprise our country’s security,” the State House official said.

Kiambu Woman Representative Gathoni Wamuchomba commended the US for holding Adani accountable.

“The indictment sets a precedent for addressing public asset grabs disguised as Public-Private Partnerships. All eyes are now on Kenyan courts to ensure accountability,” said Wamuchomba.

Before the American move on Adani, his entry into Kenya had received bipartisan support with backing from the government and the opposition. Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga had defended the Indian firm, citing its involvement in multiple infrastructure projects across Asia, Europe and Africa.

Powerful Kenyans

Barrack Muluka, a political analyst, last month said that Adani may have been a front for powerful Kenyan figures leveraging his projects for personal gain.

“Adani is merely a mask; the real influence comes from within the government. Officials masquerading as investors are transferring public resources into private hands,” Muluka said.

Nelson Amenya, the whistleblower who exposed details of the deal, echoed this sentiment, urging full transparency. “The nation has wasted nearly a year on a project that didn’t take off. Those responsible must be held accountable,” said Amenya, who has been heavily celebrated on social media.

The cancellations have reignited political debates. Lawyer Ahmednasir Abdullahi described the decision as an act of God, attributing the turnaround to external pressure and evidence of corruption.

Adani Group had secured a Sh240 billion deal to manage JKIA for 30 years. This included a second runway and terminal upgrades.

Another Sh85 billion project with Ketraco was to build and operate power transmission lines for 30 years. Both deals drew criticism over corruption fears, potential job losses and the involvement of a scandal-plagued firm.

Intelligence reports

Energy Minister Opiyo Wandayi initially defended the projects, assuring Parliament that there was no evidence of misconduct in the procurement of the power lines deal.

“We relied on rigorous due diligence and have no knowledge of other adverse matters,” he said hours before the President cancelled the contracts.

President Ruto, in his State of the Nation address, confirmed that the cancellation was based on “new information provided by investigative agencies and partner nations.”

“In the face of credible information on corruption, I will not hesitate to act decisively,” Ruto told Parliament, attributing the new information to reports by government agencies following due diligence.

Government sources revealed that intelligence reports from countries where Adani operates, including the US, Australia and Malaysia, played a key role in the decision. Kenyan authorities consulted these nations to assess Adani’s track record, reinforcing the rationale for terminating the deals.

In the wake of the developments in the US, Adani Green cancelled a Sh78 billion ($600 million) bond sale and US financial regulators also charged the company for using deceptive practices to obtain funding.

Defending the group, a spokesperson denied any wrongdoing.

“The Adani Group has always upheld the highest standards of governance,” the spokesperson said.

November 23, 2024
Adani Group Reacts To US Bribery Charges, Vows Legal Action

The Adani Group on Thursday strongly refuted bribery allegations made by the against directors of the Adani Green as baseless.

The Adani Group spokesperson in an official statement said all legal recourse will be taken.
“The US Department of Justice and the US Securities and Exchange Commission against directors of Adani Green are baseless and denied,” the statement read.
The group further highlighted a key aspect of the legal proceedings, noting, “As stated by the US Department of Justice itself, ‘the charges in the indictment are allegations and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.’ All possible legal recourse will be sought.”

The Adani Group also reaffirmed its dedication to high standards of governance, compliance, and transparency across its operations.

“The Adani Group has always upheld and is steadfastly committed to maintaining the highest standards of governance, transparency and regulatory compliance across all jurisdictions of its operations. We assure our stakeholders, partners and employees that we are a law-abiding organisation, fully compliant with all laws,” the statement added.

Amid these allegations, Adani Green Energy also informed stock exchanges that its subsidiaries have decided to defer their planned US dollar-denominated bond offerings.

It said “In light of these developments, our subsidiaries have presently decided not to proceed with the proposed USD denominated bond offerings”.
US prosecutors had charged Gautam Adani and others in an alleged Solar Energy contract bribery case. A five-count criminal indictment has been unsealed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, charging prominent Indian executives including Chairman of the Adani Group Gautam Adani by linking them to an alleged bribery and fraud scheme.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York, “A five-count criminal indictment was unsealed in federal court charging Gautam Adani, Sagar R. Adani, and Vneet S. Jaain, with conspiracies to commit securities and wire fraud and substantive securities fraud for their roles in a multi-billion-dollar scheme to obtain funds from U.S. investors and global financial institutions on the basis of false and misleading statements.”

The indictment also charges Ranjit Gupta and Rupesh Agarwal, former executives of a renewable-energy company with securities that had traded on the New York Stock Exchange (the U.S. Issuer), and Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal and Deepak Malhotra, former employees of a Canadian institutional investor, with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection with the alleged bribery scheme.

November 21, 2024
Billionaire Gautam Adani Of India’s Adani Group Charged In US With Bribery, Fraud

Gautam Adani, the billionaire chair of Indian conglomerate Adani Group and one of the world’s richest people, has been indicted in New York over his role in an alleged multibillion-dollar bribery and fraud scheme, U.S. prosecutors said on Wednesday.

Authorities said Adani and seven other defendants, including his nephew Sagar Adani, agreed to pay about $265 million in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain solar energy supply contracts expected to yield $2 billion of profit over 20 years.

According to an indictment, some conspirators referred privately to Gautam Adami with the code names “Numero uno” and “the big man,” while Sagar Adani allegedly used his cellphone to track specifics about the bribes.

Prosecutors also said the Adanis and another executive at Adani Green Energy, Vneet Jaain, raised more than $3 billion in loans and bonds for that company by concealing the corruption from lenders and investors.

The case involves alleged violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a U.S. anti-bribery law.

India’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Lawyers for the defendants could not immediately be identified.

Gautam Adani, 62, is worth $69.8 billion according to Forbes magazine, making him the world’s 22nd richest person and India’s second-richest person behind Reliance Industries Chair Mukesh Ambani.

Among the other defendants are Ranjit Gupta and Rupesh Agarwal, respectively a former chief executive and former chief strategy and commercial officer of Azure Power Global, and Cyril Cabanes, a director there.

The other defendants, as well as Cabanes, also worked for a Canadian institutional investor, prosecutors said.

Seven of the defendants are Indian citizens who lived in India during the relevant period, while Cabanes is a dual French-Australian citizen who lived in Singapore, prosecutors said.

According to court records, a judge has issued arrest warrants for Gautam Adani and Sagar Adani, and prosecutors plan to hand those warrants to foreign law enforcement.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed related civil charges against Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani and Cabanes.

Last week, Gautam Adani said in a post on social media platform X that his conglomerate planned to invest $10 billion in U.S. energy security and infrastructure projects, creating a potential 15,000 jobs, without providing a timetable.

Adani announced the investment while also congratulating U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on his election win.

Trump has pledged to make it easier for energy companies to drill on federal land and build new pipelines.

In January 2023, the U.S.-based short-seller Hindenburg Research accused Adani Group of using offshore tax havens improperly, a charge the company denied. The report sparked an approximately $150 billion meltdown in Adani Group stocks.

The charges were announced hours after Adani on Wednesday raised $600 million from a sale of 20-year “green” bonds.

November 21, 2024