Indian conglomerate chair Gautam Adani indicted in the US
Gautam Adani, the chair of Indian conglomerate Adani Group and one of the world’s richest people, has been indicted in New York over an alleged multibillion-dollar fraud scheme, United States prosecutors have said. On Wednesday authorities charged Adani and two other executives at Adani Green Energy, his nephew Sagar Adani and Vneet Jaain, with agreeing between 2020 and 2024 to pay more than $250m in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain solar energy supply contracts expected to yield $2bn in profits. Prosecutors said the renewable energy company also raised more than $3bn in loans and bonds during this period based on false and misleading statements. Five other people were hit with related criminal conspiracy charges, including two executives of another renewable energy company, and three employees of a Canadian institutional investor. Adani Group did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside business hours in India, where the charges were announced early Thursday morning. India’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to court records, a judge has issued arrest warrants for Gautam Adani and Sagar Adani, and prosecutors plan to hand those warrants to foreign law enforcement. The case involves alleged violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a US anti-bribery law. Seven of the eight defendants are Indian citizens and lived in India, while the eighth, Cyril Cabanes, is a dual French-Australian citizen who lived in Singapore, prosecutors said. The US Securities and Exchange Commission filed related civil charges against Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani and Cabanes, 50, an executive at Azure Power Global. Prosecutors identified Cabanes as one of the Canadian investor’s employees. Gautam Adani is worth $69.8bn, according to Forbes magazine, making him the world’s 22nd richest and India’s second-richest person. ‘Elaborate scheme’ “The defendants orchestrated an elaborate scheme to bribe Indian government officials to secure contracts worth billions of dollars and Gautam S Adani, Sagar R Adani and Vneet S Jaain lied about the bribery scheme as they sought to raise capital from US and international investors,” US Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement. “These offenses were allegedly committed by senior executives and directors to obtain and finance massive state energy supply contracts through corruption and fraud at the expense of US investors,” added Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lisa H Miller. On several occasions, Gautam Adani personally met with an Indian government official to advance the bribery scheme, and the defendants held in-person meetings with each other to discuss aspects of its execution, the prosecutors alleged. According to the indictment, some conspirators referred privately to Gautam Adami with the code names “Numero Uno” and “The Big Man”, while Sagar Adani allegedly used his cellphone to track specifics about the bribes. The charges were announced hours after Adani on Wednesday raised $600m from a sale of 20-year “green” bonds. Last week, Gautam Adani said in a post on social media platform X that his conglomerate planned to invest $10bn in US energy security and infrastructure projects, creating a potential 15,000 jobs, without providing a timetable. Adani announced the investment while also congratulating US President-elect Donald Trump on his election win. Trump has pledged to make it easier for energy companies to drill on federal land and build new pipelines. The $32bn (revenues) Adani Group has interests in ports, airports, power generation and transmission, and green energy, among other businesses. Last year in January, US-based short-seller Hindenburg Research accused Adani and his companies of stock market manipulation and fraud, allegations denied by the group. India’s top court ruled in favour of the group a year later. Adblock test (Why?)
At least 150 people killed over past week in Haiti’s Port-au-Prince: UN
At least 150 people have been killed in Port-au-Prince over the past week, the United Nations says, as the Haitian capital reels from a surge in gang violence. In a statement on Wednesday, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said more than half of the deaths – at least 55 percent – came “from exchanges of fire between gang members and police”. Another 92 people were injured in the violence, and about 20,000 others have been forcibly displaced from their homes. “Port-au-Prince’s estimated four million people are practically being held hostage as gangs now control all the main roads in and out of the capital,” Volker Turk, the high commissioner, said in the statement. “The latest upsurge in violence in Haiti’s capital is a harbinger of worse to come. The gang violence must be promptly halted. Haiti must not be allowed to descend further into chaos.” Haiti has reeled from years of violence as powerful armed groups – often with ties to the country’s political and business leaders – have vied for influence and control of territory. But the situation worsened dramatically after the July 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise, which created a power vacuum. Earlier this year, the gangs launched attacks on prisons and other state institutions across Port-au-Prince, fuelling a renewed political crisis. The campaign of violence led to the resignation of Haiti’s unelected prime minister, the creation of a transitional presidential council, and the deployment of a UN-backed, multinational police mission. That Kenya-led police force – formally known as the Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) – has failed to take control back from the gangs, however. Only a fraction of the planned contingent has arrived in Haiti so far, while the United States, the MSS’s key backer, has been pushing to get more funding and personnel to bolster the force. The US also has been pushing to transform the mission into a UN peacekeeping force, a proposal that has the backing of Haitian leaders but is opposed by veto-holding UN Security Council members China and Russia. Monica Juma, a national security adviser to the Kenyan presidency, said during a special UNSC session on Haiti on Wednesday afternoon that Nairobi “strongly supports” that push. Juma said the MSS currently counts 416 “boots on the ground” from Belize, Bahamas, Jamaica and Kenya, but that is “too few for the task ahead”. “The urgency for a surge in the MSS personnel deployment is evident,” she told the council in New York. Many Haitians remain wary of UN interventions, however, saying past deployments have brought more harm than good. A deadly 2010 cholera outbreak was linked to a UN peacekeeping base, for example, and UN forces in Haiti were also accused of rape and sexual abuse. Still, civil society leaders in Haiti have cautiously welcomed the Kenya-led multinational mission as a needed boost in the fight against the gangs while also stressing that the problems facing the Caribbean country will not be solved by force alone. They have called for more support and training for Haiti’s national police force, as well as an end to corruption and a Haitian-led political process. In the meantime, Haitian armed groups are now believed to control at least 80 percent of Port-au-Prince. Planes were hit by gunfire earlier this month at the airport in the capital, prompting international airlines to suspend flights into the city and isolating the country further. The incidents came amid an internal power struggle that saw the transitional presidential council tasked with rebuilding Haitian state institutions vote to dismiss another interim prime minister, Gary Conille, and appoint his replacement, Alix Didier Fils-Aime. Speaking at the UNSC session on Wednesday, Miroslav Jenca, the UN’s assistant secretary-general for Europe, Central Asia and the Americas, said Haiti is facing more than “just another wave of insecurity”. “It is a dramatic escalation that shows no signs of abating,” Jenca told the council. “The human consequences are severe. We are deeply concerned about the safety, basic needs and human rights of people residing in gang-controlled areas, in particular, those of women and children.” Adblock test (Why?)
Archegos’s Bill Hwang sentenced to 18 years in prison for massive US fraud
Hwang had been convicted in July on 10 criminal charges including wire and securities fraud, market manipulation. Former billionaire investor Sung Kook “Bill” Hwang has been sentenced to 18 years in prison over the collapse of Archegos Capital Management, which cost Wall Street banks more than $10bn. Hwang was sentenced on Wednesday by United States District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan, where a jury convicted Hwang in July on 10 criminal charges including wire fraud, securities fraud and market manipulation. “The amount of losses that were caused by your conduct are larger than any other losses I have dealt with,” Hellerstein said before announcing the sentence. Archegos’s March 2021 implosion took less than a week, stunning Wall Street and Hwang’s lenders. The US Attorney’s office in Manhattan sought a 21-year prison term for Hwang – unusually long for a white-collar case – and for him to forfeit $12.35bn and make restitution to victims. “It stands among a rare class of cases that truly could be described as a national calamity,” prosecutor Andrew Thomas said at the sentencing hearing before Hellerstein. Hellerstein did not reach a decision on Wednesday on whether Hwang must forfeit money or pay restitution. The sentencing hearing is expected to resume on Thursday. Before sentencing Hwang, Hellerstein asked the defendant’s lawyer, Dani James, how she thought Hwang compared to Sam Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced in March to 25 years in prison for stealing $8bn from users of the now-bankrupt FTX exchange. “Mr Bankman-Fried was literally stealing from his customers,” James said. “I don’t think that’s what’s happened here.” Hwang had asked for no prison, forfeiture or restitution, and to remain free on bail while he appealed his conviction. James said his low risk of committing more crimes meant a lengthy prison term served no purpose. “The notion that he would commit a crime in the future, it’s just not so,” James said. Bankman-Fried denies wrongdoing and is appealing his conviction. Aggressive borrowing Hwang, 60, was a protege of late hedge-fund billionaire Julian Robertson. He set up Archegos in New York as a family office in 2013, the year after his former hedge fund Tiger Asia Management pleaded guilty to wire fraud in an insider trading case. Prosecutors accused Hwang of lying to banks about Archegos’s portfolio so he could borrow money aggressively and make concentrated bets on media and technology stocks such as ViacomCBS, now called Paramount Global. While Archegos eventually managed $36bn, Hwang’s borrowing helped him amass $160bn of exposure to stocks. His downfall occurred when Hwang was unable to meet margin calls, as the prices of some of his favourite stocks began falling and various banks unloaded stocks that had backed his so-called total return swaps. More than $100bn of market value in Hwang’s stocks was wiped out. Several banks suffered losses, including Credit Suisse, which lost $5.5bn, and Nomura Holdings. Credit Suisse is now part of UBS. Hwang’s lawyers’ request for no punishment also cited Hwang’s Christian faith and his nonprofit Grace and Mercy Foundation, which has, since 2006, donated at least $600m to combat homelessness, poverty and human trafficking, among other causes. In a statement to the court before Hellerstein announced the sentence, Hwang said he hoped the punishment would “allow me to serve as much as I can given the circumstances”. Hwang’s lawyers have said his net worth has fallen to “at most” $55.3m. Hwang’s co-defendant, former Archegos Chief Financial Officer Patrick Halligan, was convicted at the same trial on three criminal charges. His sentencing is scheduled for January 27. Both chose not to testify at their two-month trial. Adblock test (Why?)
House Republicans grill HHS Secretary Becerra over migrant children: ‘Would not want to be you’
House Republicans grilled Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra on Wednesday over his agency’s failure to account for thousands of unaccounted migrant children and the process used to vet their sponsors amid concerns of exploitation and abuse. Speaking before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, Becerra testified about his department’s Refugee Resettlement Office, which is charged with caring for and placement of unaccompanied migrant children. Republican subcommittee members accused the Biden administration of rushing migrant children out of HHS custody and into the hands of unvetted sponsors who sometimes exploit and abuse them while not conducting adequate background checks. ‘IT’LL UPEND THE COMMUNITY’: PA TOWN ROILED BY TALK OF MIGRANT HOUSING IN CIVIL WAR-ERA ORPHANAGE “How can you say that the No. 1 priority is the safety of these unaccompanied children when you’re placing them in sponsors’ homes that occasionally have had criminal gang affiliations because there are no proper background checks?” Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., asked. Becerra said his agency follows “child welfare best practices” that include “extensive” background checks. “No sponsor would be allowed to take a child if we have information that shows that they are engaged in criminal activity,” he said. Lawmakers, however, said thousands of violent criminal illegal immigrants and unaccompanied migrant children have been released across the United States under the Biden administration’s watch. They cited the murder of Laken Riley, a Georgia college student killed by an illegal immigrant, and the 2022 killing of Kayla Hamilton in Maryland by Walter Javier Martinez, who was in the country illegally from El Salvador. Martinez was taken to the ORR as an unaccompanied child despite a previous arrest in his home country. FLASHBACK: PA REPUBLICANS DRAFT BILL DIVERTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS FROM SECRETIVE BIDEN-DHS FLIGHTS TO DE “One call to Salvadoran authorities would have confirmed this and an association with MS-13,” said subcommittee Chair Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif. “Instead, Martinez was released into our country with no questions asked. He has since admitted to four murders, two rapes and additional other crimes.” Other cases include the killing of 11-year-old Maria Gonzalez, who was found by her father last year sexually assaulted and strangled in her home. Her alleged killer, Juan Carlos Garcia-Rodriguez, illegally entered the U.S. from Guatemala in 2023, but was allowed to stay in the country via a sponsor in Louisiana. ‘100% ON BOARD:’ BORDER STATE OFFERS TRUMP MASSIVE PLOT OF LAND TO AID MASS DEPORTATION OPERATION In the case of vetting unaccompanied children, the Department of Homeland Security performs that task, Becerra said. HHS vets potential sponsors once the child is in its care, he said. “HHS’s custodial responsibility and overnight for unaccompanied children through ORR ends once we place the child with an appropriately vetted supervisor,” the secretary stated. Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas., noted that the Biden administration admitted more than 100,000 refugees in the past year alone, compared to 12,000 in 2020 under President-elect Trump. “Under the Biden-Harris administration, Americans are left behind while the needs of ‘new’ Americans are pushed to the front of the line,” said Hunt. “Americans are sick and tired of being treated like second-class citizens in our own country.” When asked what he would do differently after four years, Becerra failed to answer the question. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP “Do you understand how this affects the lives of a population that you’ve placed that is approaching the size of the state of Wyoming?” asked McClintock. “Some of them: innocent, defenseless children. Others: gang members who are 17-years-old or pretending to be 17.” “Mr. Secretary, when the history of this administration is written, I would not want to be you looking back at what historians say about your tenure,” he said before adjourning the hearing.