By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK, June 26 (Reuters) – A U.S. judge ordered the Justice Department on Friday to justify its decision to drop criminal charges against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, declining to rule immediately on Adani’s lawyers’ request to dismiss the case.
Brooklyn-based U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis said federal prosecutors’ May 18 announcement that they would no longer pursue the case, which charged Adani with securities fraud and wire fraud stemming from an alleged bribery scheme, did not sufficiently explain their decision.
“The Government’s terse, bland and conclusory statement affords the court neither a sufficient basis to reach any conclusion, nor the opportunity to conduct any analysis of the Government’s request for dismissal,” wrote Garaufis, who gave the Justice Department until July 13 to submit more information.
The Adani case was brought in 2024 at the end of Democratic President Joe Biden’s term. The decision to drop the charges marked the latest instance in which the Justice Department has sought to end a high-profile white collar criminal prosecution during Republican President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.
Legal experts say U.S. judges have little discretion to compel prosecutors to continue with criminal cases they no longer wish to pursue, but the charges remain officially pending until Garaufis orders them dismissed.
A spokesperson for the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s office, which brought the charges, declined to comment.
Adani Group, Adani’s company, has consistently denied wrongdoing. Adani himself has not appeared in U.S. court to respond to the charges.
Robert Giuffra, a lawyer for Adani, referred to the letter he wrote to Garaufis on Wednesday, arguing the case should be dismissed because it was beyond the reach of U.S. law and prosecutors would be unable to prove the alleged bribery in India.
DEFENSE CITES ‘LEGAL AND FACTUAL WEAKNESSES’
Adani was charged in 2024 with agreeing to bribe Indian government officials so a subsidiary of his Adani Group could win approval to develop a solar energy plant, then misleading U.S. investors by providing reassuring information about his company’s anti-corruption practices.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission also brought civil charges. The SEC has reached a settlement in which Adani would pay $6 million and his nephew, Sagar Adani, would pay $12 million.
Adani Enterprises Limited has separately agreed to pay $275 million to the U.S. Treasury Department to settle alleged violations of Iran sanctions.
In his June 24 letter to Garaufis, Giuffra said lawyers for Adani and his co-defendants had several meetings with Justice Department officials and submitted nearly 500 pages of materials to convince them the case was flawed.
“The DOJ’s decision reflects its careful consideration of the indictment’s legal and factual weaknesses,” Giuffra wrote.
‘PROSECUTORIAL DISCRETION’ CITED
In their brief letter to Garaufis last month, senior officials said the Justice Department “decided, in its prosecutorial discretion, not to devote further resources to these criminal charges against individual defendants.”
The rank-and-file prosecutors who brought the case did not sign the letter.
Justice Department officials in Washington last year dropped corruption charges brought under Biden against then-New York Mayor Eric Adams over the objections of the career prosecutors who brought the case, several of whom resigned.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York, Editing by Franklin Paul, Rod Nickel and Cynthia Osterman)
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