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New Delhi: A US federal court dismissed securities and wire fraud charges against Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani, his nephew Sagar Adani and Adani Green Energy chief executive Vneet Jaain, but refused to drop bribery and obstruction charges against five other defendants for now , with the judge sharply criticising the Justice Department for citing Indian court and regulatory orders that never examined the bribery allegations at the heart of the indictment.

In a 47-page order issued on Monday (August 10), Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York granted, in part, the Department of Justice’s motion to dismiss the indictment, throwing out with prejudice the securities fraud conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy and securities fraud counts against the three businessmen who had appeared before the court through their lawyers.

But he reserved judgment on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act charge against five other defendants – Ranjit Gupta and Rupesh Agarwal, former executives of renewable-energy company Azure Power, and Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal and Deepak Malhotra, former executives of Canadian pension fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), which was a major investor in Azure Power. The obstruction charge applies to four of the five, with the judge ordering the department to return with a fuller factual justification by August 31.

The judge found that only one of the 11 reasons put forward by Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter was sufficient for dismissal. He accepted the argument that the statements in Adani Green’s financial documents about its anti-bribery policies amounted to “inactionable puffery”.

In a footnote near the end of the ruling, Garaufis wrote: “No one should mistake the court’s granting of the Rule 48(a) Motion as to Counts Two, Three, and Four, for the court’s agreement with the Department’s decision to dismiss these Counts or as expressing any opinion about the merits of the case.”

The ruling came after a two-month back-and-forth between the court and the Justice Department over the department’s May 18 request to abandon the prosecution. Garaufis initially declined to approve the motion, which contained little more than the assertion that the DOJ had decided “in its prosecutorial discretion” not to devote further resources to the case, and ordered prosecutors to provide detailed reasons and factual support, prompting McCotter’s July 4 submission.

Reacting to the ruling on X, Gautam Adani struck a note of vindication, saying he welcomed the court’s decision “with humility and deep respect for the judicial process”. “Throughout this challenging period, our faith in truth, fairness and the rule of law remained unwavering,” he wrote, thanking “those who never lost faith in us, in the system and in India’s capacity for justice”.

The judge, however, has pointedly rejected McCotter’s claim that Indian authorities had already examined the allegations.

The Indian orders were decisions “not to investigate”, US judge says

In his July 4 letter to the court, McCotter had told the judge that “India has investigated many of the allegations in this case and in several reports and decisions issued in 2026 has found no actionable misconduct,” directing the court to three Indian documents he said he had reviewed before filing the dismissal motion.

Garaufis said the documents did not support that description. “Not one of the documents appears to be the result of an investigation by India or anyone else,” he wrote. “Rather, each document appears to be a decision by an Indian government authority not to investigate.”

The judge added that none of the three documents “meaningfully contends with the allegations in this case”. The allegations raised by private individuals in the Indian proceedings, he said, bore “very little resemblance” to the conduct alleged in the US indictment.

The judge went through each of the three filings in turn. The Competition Commission of India’s April 2026 order, he noted, had considered a private complaint alleging that the Adani Group had “abused their market dominance” in India’s power generation sector in violation of the Competition Act. 

But, Garaufis noted, the US indictment did not allege industry collusion. The CCI had decided not to investigate the complaint, and the judge said it appeared to have concluded that the bribery allegations contained in the US indictment “do not seem to qualify” as violations of the Competition Act.

The Delhi high court’s March 2026 order, he wrote, had declined “a private individual’s invitation to investigate ‘grave irregularities’ in the ‘competitive bidding process for solar power projects'” under its public interest litigation jurisdiction. “No allegations of bribery, securities fraud, or wire fraud were made or investigated,” he wrote.

The third was a March 27 Bombay high court judgment concerning a private petition seeking an investigation into alleged bribery. That court too declined to investigate, relying in part on the Delhi high........

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