A year ago, the Department of Justice under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. surprised India by indicting Gautam Adani, the country’s most prominent businessman with personal ties to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on charges of wire and securities fraud.
Since then, there has been nearly nothing to show. The case against Mr. Adani, whose indictment was announced on Nov. 20 last year, two weeks after President Trump won re-election, has remained dormant for almost a year on the federal docket.
While little has changed about the case, the relationship between the United States and India has shifted dramatically under Mr. Trump. India’s archrival, Pakistan, is suddenly favored in the White House. The U.S. imposed witheringly high tariffs on India’s exports, including a special penalty imposed for India’s purchase of Russian oil. In addition, the Justice Department has flipped its personnel, priorities, and, according to attorneys who have left, its very purpose.
It’s not just the five criminal charges against Mr. Adani and seven of his colleagues that have stalled. The same is true for a civil complaint filed against them by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Mr. Adani is no ordinary Indian businessman. He rose to the heights of power alongside Mr. Modi. The two cooperated closely for decades, and in the years since Mr. Modi took national office, the Adani Group has become the driving force behind the country’s biggest ports, highways, energy projects and more. In the process, Mr. Adani became the second richest man in the world at one point, and now has an estimated net worth exceeding $90 billion.
It is not clear why the case has come to a standstill. Mr. Adani’s fate is being decided while Mr. Trump is negotiating with India over a complex set of issues. India has yet to secure a trade deal with the White House, meaning its products are subject to a 50 percent import duty, including the penalty for buying Russian oil.
Federal prosecutors with the Eastern District of New York accused Mr. Adani of conspiracy to commit bribery and defraud investors. They claimed that Mr. Adani and his associates had attempted to bribe a politician in India to secure contracts for a solar project, and then lied to investors in New York about the scheme. The Adani Group has denied the accusations. It warned investors in November that it cannot “predict the outcome or timing” of the proceedings.
“A case like this takes some time, but usually it doesn’t take quite so long,” said Vikramaditya Khanna, a law professor specializing in white-collar crime at the University of Michigan. He said the trade negotiations could be delaying proceedings, as well as staffing shortages at the Justice Department and the just-ended six-week government shutdown.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York declined to comment.
Magistrate Judge James R. Cho, who is presiding over the S.E.C.’s civil case against Mr. Adani, paused the proceedings in October, citing the government shutdown.
Christopher M. Colorado, a lawyer with the S.E.C., wrote in an October filing that India’s Ministry of Law and Justice had not served Mr. Adani with a summons to appear in court, even after the agency had requested it to do so under an international treaty. The case cannot proceed until the summons is served, or until the judge determines that the defendant is evading it.
Since he was charged, Mr. Adani has not traveled to the United States, where he could be arrested. His extradition is unlikely, in part because India has no equivalent to the U.S. laws under which Mr. Adani was indicted.
Federal cases involving foreign defendants who remain at large can take years to reach a resolution, or even for defendants to be brought to court. Rafael Caro Quintero, the drug lord who founded the forerunner to the Sinaloa cartel, was first indicted on sweeping drug trafficking charges in 2015 but did not appear in federal court for a decade.
Mr. Adani appeared by Mr. Modi’s side at the inaugurations of the Navi Mumbai airport and the Vizhinjam seaport, giant new infrastructure projects that his conglomerate built. He has traveled extensively within India and once to China.
The legal issues have done little to slow Mr. Adani’s companies. They continue to win high-profile contracts, including those with American companies. AdaniConnex, the group’s construction arm, will help build Google’s data centers in India, a $15 billion investment. The conglomerate’s earnings are improving, helping to reduce its debt and lift its credit ratings.
When Mr. Adani was indicted, the combined market value of the Adani Group’s seven listed companies fell 20 percent. Now, those companies are worth more than when the charges were brought.
This is not the first time that the Adani Group has faced a threat from the United States, only to regain momentum. In January 2023, a short-seller called Hindenburg Research accused it of stock manipulation, bringing its valuation crashing down by almost $150 billion. Hindenburg disbanded two years later.
Alex Travelli is a correspondent based in New Delhi, writing about business and economic developments in India and the rest of South Asia.
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