Judge Grants Justice Dept. Request to Dismiss Case Against Indian Tycoon

A federal judge on Monday dismissed criminal charges against Gautam Adani, India’s richest man, granting a contentious request made by the Justice Department after Mr. Adani offered billions of dollars in investment if the case were to be abandoned.

In a 47-page ruling, the judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York, wrote that important elements of the case were legally dubious and that he was convinced the $10 billion investment offer did not factor in the Justice Department’s decision to seek the dismissal.

But Judge Garaufis nonetheless sharply criticized the department’s conduct, homing in on Trent McCotter, a senior Justice Department official who led the effort to drop the case. Mr. McCotter, the principal associate deputy attorney general, had shown an alarming lack of respect for the judicial branch, Judge Garaufis wrote.

Earlier, Mr. McCotter had suggested in court filings that the case was a politically motivated prosecution brought by the previous Justice Department, a claim that Judge Garaufis called baseless and “unbecoming of his office.”

And rather than listen to the various federal officials who investigated the case, as is typical in deciding whether to abandon a prosecution, Mr. McCotter used his “his singular judgment,” working in consultation with Mr. Adani’s lawyers, Judge Garaufis wrote.

“The irregularities in the decision to dismiss the indictment are concerning,” Judge Garaufis wrote.

In a statement posted on X, Mr. Adani wrote that he welcomed the decision “with humility and deep respect for the judicial process.” In response to a request for comment, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department referred to Mr. McCotter’s filing from last month.

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Mr. Adani is a titan of industry in India and a close ally of Narendra Modi, the country’s strongman prime minister. Along with seven others, Mr. Adani was indicted in November 2024 on charges that he paid bribes to Indian officials to secure solar energy contracts for one of his companies.

On Monday, while dismissing the charges against Mr. Adani and two other defendants, Judge Garaufis kept open the counts against the four remaining defendants.

When the indictment was announced, federal prosecutors under the Biden administration said that the scheme involved “corruption and fraud at the expense of U.S. investors.”

Yet the case faced long odds of prosecution in a federal courtroom. None of the defendants was present in the United States when the charges were announced, and the Justice Department under President Trump had broadly signaled that it was uninterested in prosecuting an array of white-collar crime, including the sort of scheme that Mr. Adani was accused of engineering.

In May, The New York Times reported that Mr. Adani’s legal team, led by Robert J. Giuffra, a personal lawyer to President Trump and a co-chairman of the firm Sullivan & Cromwell, had met with Justice Department officials to argue the case should be dismissed.

Along with showing why, in his view, the case lacked basic evidence, Mr. Giuffra said that Mr. Adani would be able to invest $10 billion if the criminal case against his client, along with a parallel civil case and an investigation by the Treasury Department, were to be resolved.

The Justice Department has denied that Mr. Adani’s offer played a role in its decision to drop the prosecution. In legal filings, Mr. McCotter blasted the entire prosecution as flawed, even suggesting that disgruntled Justice Department officials had acted “unethically” by speaking to the media about the case.

In July, Judge Garaufis took the extraordinary step of asking Mr. Adani whether he knew of “any agreement exchanging anything for the dismissal.” In a sworn affidavit, Mr. Adani acknowledged that his lawyers had made the offer, but said it was ultimately not relevant to the Justice Department’s decision.

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