United States: The United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York has granted in part the Department of Justice's bid to drop the criminal indictment against Gautam Adani and seven other executives linked to the Adani Group, dismissing the securities and wire fraud charges while refusing, for now, to let the government walk away from the bribery and obstruction counts.
The case arose from an October 2024 indictment accusing Adani, his nephew Sagar Adani, and six other current or former executives of a scheme to pay approximately $265 million in bribes to Indian government officials for solar energy contracts, and of lying to American investors to raise nearly $4 billion in financing while concealing the payments.
Three of the eight defendants, Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani, and Vneet Jaain, appeared through counsel and consented to the dismissal. The remaining five, who face separate bribery and obstruction charges, have not appeared in the case at all and are believed to be living abroad.
In May 2026, the Department moved under Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to dismiss the entire indictment with prejudice. The one-paragraph motion, filed by Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter, stated only that the Department had decided “not to devote further resources” to the case.
Judge Nicholas Garaufis ordered the government to explain itself, and what followed was a months-long exchange in which the court repeatedly found the Department's justifications wanting. Of six broad reasons McCotter offered for dropping every charge, the court rejected all six as unsupported conclusions, noting that some contradicted the indictment itself or the very foreign court documents McCotter cited as support.
On the fraud charges, the court accepted only one of the government's three arguments: that the allegedly false statements made by Adani Green Energy about its anti-bribery compliance were generic enough to qualify as inactionable “puffery” rather than material misrepresentations. On that narrow basis, the court dismissed the securities and wire fraud counts against the three appearing defendants with prejudice.
The court was far less receptive to the government's case for dropping the bribery and obstruction charges against the five non-appearing defendants. It found that McCotter's reliance on the Trump administration's Blanche Memorandum, which reoriented FCPA enforcement toward conduct threatening national security or American businesses, actually cut against dismissal, since the alleged bribes were tied to energy infrastructure that the memorandum itself flags as a priority. The court also rejected McCotter's account of the obstruction allegations as a straw-man argument that ignored claims of deleted evidence and false statements to federal investigators in New York.
Much of the order is devoted to a controversy that has trailed the case since May: reports that the dismissal followed Adani's public pledge to invest $10 billion in the United States, and that his lawyer, Robert Giuffra, who also represents President Trump personally, raised the investment during settlement talks with prosecutors. Sworn statements from Giuffra, Adani, McCotter, and the current U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District, Joseph Nocella, all maintain that the investment pledge played no role in the Department's decision. The court accepted those assurances but did not hide its unease about how the case had been handled.
The judge was pointed about the process itself. He noted that McCotter reached his decision largely in meetings with defense counsel, without input from the FBI or SEC agents who investigated the case or the prosecutors who originally brought it, and wrote that this approach “evinces a lack of respect for the Judiciary as a co-equal branch.”
The Department now has until August 31, 2026 to submit sufficient factual support for dismissing the bribery conspiracy and obstruction charges against the five non-appearing defendants, and their lawyers must separately confirm their clients' consent to the dismissal by the same date.
Appearances:
For the Department of Justice: Mr. R. Trent McCotter and Mr. Joseph Nocella, Jr.
For the Appearing Defendants: Mr. Robert J. Giuffra, Jr., Sullivan & Cromwell LLP.
Case Title: United States of America v. Gautam S. Adani et al., No. 24-CR-0433 (NGG).
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