NEW WORK/DELHI: A US federal judge has permanently dismissed criminal charges against Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani and his nephew Sagar, removing a major legal overhang that had dogged the ports-to-energy conglomerate for nearly two years.
US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York approved the Justice Department's request to dismiss the charges.
Adani welcomed the country's decision, saying he accepted it with "humility" and "deep respect" for the judicial process.
In a 47-page order issued on August 10, Garaufis granted the Justice Department's Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss Counts Two, Three and Four of the indictment against Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani, and former Adani Green Energy CEO Vneet Jaain.
The counts covered securities-fraud conspiracy, wire-fraud conspiracy and securities fraud. The dismissals were with prejudice, meaning the charges cannot be refiled.
Garaufis reserved judgment on Count One, alleging Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, and Count Five, alleging conspiracy to obstruct justice, both involving five non-appearing, India-based co-defendants: Ranjit Gupta, Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal, Deepak Malhotra, and Rupesh Agarwal.
The Justice Department has until August 31 to satisfy the court's requirements, while counsel for the non-appearing defendants must confirm their clients' consent by the same date.
The judge stressed that the dismissal was an exercise of prosecutorial discretion, not a verdict on the allegations. "No one should mistake" the ruling for the court's agreement with the government's decision or an opinion on the merits, Garaufis wrote. No trial was held, witnesses were examined or evidence tested in court.
The indictment, returned by a grand jury on October 24, 2024 and unsealed on November 20, 2024, alleged three interlocking schemes between 2020 and 2024. It accused Adani executives of paying about USD 265 million in bribes to Indian officials to secure solar-power contracts projected to generate more than USD 2 billion in after-tax profits over two decades; misleading US and international investors to raise nearly USD 4 billion in financing; and destroying evidence and lying to the FBI, SEC and a federal grand jury.
The Adani Group has consistently denied the allegations, saying it acted in accordance with the applicable law.
In May, the Justice Department asked for the charges to be dismissed after an extensive review, citing jurisdictional and evidentiary challenges, the predominantly Indian nature of the alleged conduct, scrutiny of the matter by Indian authorities, the absence of identified investor losses and that pursuing it no longer aligned with the department's priorities.
It also argued that the case, unsealed during the closing weeks of the Biden administration, had little realistic prospect of reaching trial and appeared to have been a politically motivated "name and shame" exercise.
The request came after Adani hired a new legal team led by Robert J Giuffra Jr, co-chair of the US law firm Sullivan & Cromwell and a personal lawyer to President Donald Trump. Giuffra had reportedly met Justice Department officials earlier this year to raise concerns about the case.
Judge Garaufis initially resisted the government's request. In June, he said its explanation for abandoning the prosecution was insufficient and ordered officials to provide more information.
The judge also questioned whether Adani's pledge to invest USD 10 billion in the US and create 15,000 jobs had played a role in the decision to drop the charges.
Adani announced the investment in November 2024 in a post congratulating Trump on his election victory. Reports later said Adani's lawyers had raised the pledge during discussions with the Justice Department over the case.
Adani's lawyers said the investment was never offered in exchange for dropping the charges. Garaufis ultimately concluded that the pledge had not influenced the Justice Department's decision.
Commenting on the ruling, Adani said "truth has prevailed", adding that he respected the judicial process and was grateful to those who supported the Group during proceedings.
"Throughout this challenging period, our faith in truth, fairness and the rule of law remained unwavering," Adani said in a post on X.
He reaffirmed the Group's commitment to "nation-building", long-term value creation and serving a purpose "larger than ourselves".
Adani's legal team, retained in August 2025, submitted about 600 pages of legal arguments, expert reports and presentations to the DOJ over 10 weeks between February 3 and April 17, 2026.
The material included an 118-page letter, a 95-page slide deck, a separate 151-page presentation to the SEC and about 200 pages of expert opinions from four specialists: a Harvard Law School professor, a former acting SEC chair, a former chief justice of India and a former chairman of India's Central Electricity Authority.
Giuffra described the effort as involving "many thousands of hours".
The Adani Group says the litigation never interrupted its operations, financing or project execution. It invested more than Rs 2.08 lakh crore in the second half of FY25 and FY26, including record annual capital expenditure of Rs 1,52,967 crore in FY26 -- the highest by any Indian corporate -- while its asset base grew from Rs 4.12 lakh crore in FY23 to Rs 7.85 lakh crore in FY26 and its market capitalisation recovered above pre-indictment levels.
During the period, Navi Mumbai International Airport, Terminal 2 at Guwahati Airport, Colombo West International Terminal and the Ganga Expressway came onstream.
Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone became India's first port operator to handle more than 500 million tonnes of cargo in a financial year, while Adani Green Energy crossed 20 gigawatts of operational renewable capacity.
Several Group companies received credit-rating upgrades. Investors, including Apollo Global Management, BlackRock and Capital Group expanded their positions, while banks including MUFG, SMBC, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, and Société Générale deepened relationships with the Group.
Partnerships with Google, MSC, IHC, EdgeConneX, Embraer, and Dioxycle also expanded.
Adani announced nearly USD 15 billion in fresh investment commitments in a single week as the US legal uncertainty began to ease.
Separately, the SEC's civil action against Gautam Adani resulted in a final judgment under which he consented to permanent injunctions covering specified US securities-law violations without admitting the allegations, except as to jurisdiction.
The criminal dismissal concludes proceedings against the appearing defendants before trial, leaving no judicial finding on the underlying criminal allegations.
However, the judge Garaufis strongly criticised the way the decision was reached.
He said R Trent McCotter, principal associate deputy attorney general, had worked with Adani's lawyers on the dismissal without consulting prosecutors and investigators who had handled the case.
Garaufis rejected most of the government's stated rationales. He found that the Indian filings cited by the DOJ did not substantiate its claim that Indian authorities had cleared the conduct, and rejected its argument that the case was essentially foreign.
He also rejected a separate argument that the transactions fell outside US securities jurisdiction, noting that the indictment alleged investors "irrevocably committed themselves in the United States" and that the scheme relied on the US financial system.
The court did accept one rationale: that statements in Adani Green's bond and loan documents about a "zero tolerance policy for bribery and corruption", "robust internal compliance measures" and oversight by a risk-management committee could constitute "inactionable puffery" -- generic corporate assurances that investors could not reasonably rely on. Garaufis found that sufficient to support dismissal of the three fraud-related counts.
The judge also criticised the DOJ's internal process for seeking dismissal, describing it as containing "irregularities" and being "highly unusual".
He said Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General R Trent McCotter, who joined the Deputy Attorney General's office in January 2026 and said he had never heard of the defendants, became the sole architect of the dismissal after months of meetings with Adani's defence team, apparently without input from the FBI, Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) investigators or prosecutors who originally brought the case.
Two DOJ attorneys involved in the original indictment, Shy Jackson, and Andrew Tyler, withdrew from the case two days after McCotter filed the dismissal motion.
Garaufis also called McCotter's characterisation of the original indictment as a "name and shame" exercise "baseless" and "unbecoming of his office," saying that in 26 years on the bench he had not shared McCotter's characterisation of the integrity of the FBI, SEC, and prosecutors involved in the case.
Separately, on the day the dismissal motion was filed, the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control announced a USD 275 million settlement with Adani Enterprises over "apparent violations" of US sanctions on Iran.
OFAC described the conduct as "egregious" while saying the company had "extensively cooperated" with the investigation.