When the Justice Department indicted India’s richest man in the final weeks of the Biden administration, prosecutors described an “elaborate” bribery scheme involving “corruption and fraud at the expense of US investors”, The New York Times reports.
Now, according to several people with knowledge of the case, the Justice Department is planning to drop the charges altogether.According to a news report by NYT, the reversal came after the Indian billionaire, Gautam Adani, hired a new legal team led by Robert J Giuffra Jr, one of President Trump’s personal lawyers.
Giuffra’s efforts on Adani’s behalf culminated in a previously unreported meeting last month at the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington, according to people familiar with the meeting. Giuffra ticked through about 100 slides outlining why prosecutors lacked basic evidence, as well as the jurisdiction even to bring the case, one of the people said.
Another slide also offered the government a sweetener: If prosecutors dropped the charges, Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy and create 15,000 jobs, echoing a pledge he made in the wake of Trump’s election.
While prosecutors later told Giuffra that the $10 billion investment would play no role in the resolution of the case, his offer received a favourable response from at least one senior Justice Department official at the meeting, according to the people familiar with the meeting.The charges were originally brought against Mr. Adani by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn.
