In response to Adani’s financial and reputational meltdown, the Toxic Bonds Network, along with 17 organisations and campaigns such as the Sierra Club, Market Forces and Banktrack, sent a letter to Adani’s largest underwriters calling on them to stop underwriting bonds and deny new loans to the Adani Group.
Hindenburg’s exposure of Adani’s “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud” has been immediately followed by bond and stock values plummeting and a cancellation of Adani Enterprises US$2.5 billion share issuance. In response, trust in the Adani Group from banks and investors has been hugely eroded according to multiple analysts in the media. Most recently, Credit Suisse has stopped accepting Adani bonds as collateral and Citigroup stopped margin loans against all Adani securities.
Yet none of Adani’s major banks have publicly committed to stop underwriting the Group’s bonds. This leaves bond underwriters answerable to what due diligence was undertaken into the Adani Group and whether they plan to participate in future debt issues, as the company moves to raise over $10bn from capital markets this year. The interconnected financial nature of the Adani Group makes it clear that buying or facilitating debt from any subsidiary of Adani, is by extension supporting Adani’s mining businesses.
The letter was sent to Adani’s so-called relationship banks Barclays, Standard Chartered and Deutsche Bank, as well as Citigroup, JP Morgan, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Mizuho Financial Group, BNP Paribas, Intesa Sanpaolo, Credit Suisse, BofA and SMBC which the Adani Group actively boasts as helping to shore up its financing.
The letter to Adani’s banks follows one sent to its investors.