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New Delhi: Just over three weeks after allowing the dismissal of charges against Gautam Adani and his two other executives, a US federal judge has again refused to approve the Justice Department’s attempt to drop charges against five remaining co-defendants, repeating his earlier finding that the Indian legal orders cited by the department appeared to contradict India’s claim that its authorities had investigated the allegations.

On August 10, Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York had dismissed the securities and wire fraud charges against Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani and Vneet Jaain. 

The August 10 dismissal rested on just one of several rationales the department had put forward for dismissal, which was that the statements in Adani Green Energy’s financial documents about its anti-bribery policies, amounted to language too generic for investors to have reasonably relied on when deciding whether to buy the company’s bonds.

At the same time, the US judge reserved judgment on two charges against the five other defendants. He directed the Justice Department to provide “sufficient factual support for each reason” for seeking dismissal of those remaining counts by August 31.

It was followed by several fraught weeks between the court and DOJ, with Trent McCotter, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General and by mid-August the Acting Deputy Attorney General, sending two letters, on August 11 and August 14, which the judge stated added no new evidence.

In a 14-page memorandum and order issued on September 3, Judge Garaufis denied without prejudice the pending portions of the department’s motion to dismiss the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act conspiracy charge against Ranjit Gupta, Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal, Deepak Malhotra and Rupesh Agarwal, along with the obstruction conspiracy charge against four of the five. 

Gupta and Rupesh Agarwal are former executives of renewable energy company Azure Power, while Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal and Malhotra are former executives of Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), the Canadian pension fund that was a major investor in Azure.

The judge said the department had failed to meet the threshold procedural requirements of Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

The ruling, however, does not finally reject the Justice Department’s effort to end the prosecution. The department can make another request. Garaufis, in fact, wrote that he continued to encourage the government to submit sufficient factual support for its reasons for dismissal.

But........

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