Indian top businessman Gautam Adani’s global wealth ranking is faltering after some of his offshore investors triggered a rout in his conglomerate’s six listed stocks. The 56-year-old billionaire Adani has lost the most money this week in the world. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Gautam Adani has lost about $13.2 billion to $63.5 billion by his personal fortune tumbling.
Just a few days ago, he was closing the gap as Asia’s richest man with Mukesh Ambani. The U-turn was witnessed after the Business daily newspaper – The Economic Times reported that because of information on the owners, India’s national share depository has frozen the accounts of three Mauritius-based funds. Adani’s firm shares the bulk holdings in these three funds – the Albula Investment Fund, Cresta Fund and APMs Investment funds.
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Later, the Adani group called the report ‘blatantly erroneous’ and said that ‘it was done to deliberately mislead the investing community.’
According to Bloomberg Intelligence, the Mauritius offshore funds hold more than 90 percent of shares under the management of Adani Group.
An independent Research Analyst, Hemindra Hazari said, “There should be greater clarity to ensure who the final owners of the shares are.”
On June 14, 2021, the Adani group’s spokesperson shared a statement and declined to comment beyond the exchange filings sent this week. The spokesperson further said, “These overseas funds have been investors in Adani Enterprises for more than a decade. We urge all our stakeholders not to be perturbed by market speculations.”
On June 14, a separate statement was shared by two of the three Mauritius-based companies. Albula and APMS emailed via their management company IQ EQ Fund Services, Mauritius and said that their funds are fully operational.
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APMS said, “Fact is that the relevant NSDL entry for APMS Investment Fund Ltd. shows a technical 'account level freeze' only that has absolutely NO relevance to its normal FPI trading activities.” The funds neither replied to any question related to why they hold such concentrated positions in Adani Groups nor did they share the names of their investors.
Adani Green Energy’s shares slipped by 7.7 percent this week, Adani Ports and Special Economic zone plunged 23 percent in the last four days, Adani Power, Adani Total Gas and Adani Transmission’s shares fell at least by 18 percent, and Adani Enterprises tumbled almost 15 percent.
Since the first quarter of 2020, the investors had sent some of the Adani group’s stock soaring more than 500 percent. The companies had witnessed a big push into sectors such as renewable energy, airports, data centers and defense contracting.
At the starting of June, Adani’s wealth was close to $80 billion.
Three of Adani’s listed companies were added to the group this May, which took the total group’s fund investors to five.