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Shares in business tycoon Gautam Adani’s flagship firm nosedived again on Wednesday as the conglomerate fought short-seller allegations of accounting fraud.<\/p>\n
Adani Enterprises stocks were down 30 per cent on the Bombay Stock Exchange minutes before the bourse’s scheduled close, their fifth straight day of losses.<\/p>\n
The rout has wiped out around $92 billion of the value of the conglomerate’s listed units since last week, Bloomberg News said.<\/p>\n
Mr Adani’s personal fortune has plummeted by more than $40 billion in the same period, dropping him out of the top 10 according to the real-time Forbes list. This meant Adani was no longer Asia’s richest man.<\/p>\n
Adani Total Gas — in which French giant TotalEnergies owns 37.4 per cent — dropped another 10 per cent on Wednesday, forcing the Bombay Stock Exchange to suspend trade in the stock soon after the market’s open.<\/p>\n
The sudden sharp drop in Adani Enterprises on Wednesday afternoon came despite a stock sale in the firm on Tuesday that was oversubscribed.<\/p>\n
Smaller retail investors largely steered clear from the follow-on public offering.<\/p>\n
Large buyers instead propped up the share sale, including fellow tycoons Sajjan Jindal and Sunil Mittal, Bloomberg News reported, citing unidentified sources.<\/p>\n
Mr Adani, 60, has seen his empire expand at breakneck speed, with Adani Enterprises shares soaring by more than a thousand per cent in the past five years.<\/p>\n
This helped make him, until last week, the world’s third-richest man behind Elon Musk and Bernard Arnault and family.<\/p>\n
US investment group Hindenburg Research alleges that the Adani Group has artificially boosted the share prices of its units by funnelling money into the stocks through offshore tax havens.<\/p>\n
This “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme” is “the largest con in corporate history”, Hindenburg said in its explosive report issued last week.<\/p>\n
The Adani Group said it was the victim of a “maliciously mischievous” reputational attack and issued a 413-page statement on Sunday that said Hindenburg’s claims were “nothing but a lie”.<\/p>\n
Hindenburg, which makes money by betting on stocks falling, said in response that Adani’s statement failed to answer most of the questions raised in its report.<\/p>\n
Adani said the report was driven by “an ulterior motive” to “create a false market” to allow the US firm make financial gains by dragging stock prices down.<\/p>\n