One of the richest men in the world is presently crying tears of losses.
Gautam Adani, Indian billionaire and Asia’s richest man has seen about $20billion drop in his personal vast fortune, after stock losses in his Adani Group led to investors fleeing his companies after fraud claims by a US short selling firm, Hindenburg Research. The Adani Group itself has seen share price drops of over $50billion.
A short seller bets that a company’s share price would go down and takes a short position to benefit from the slide of the shares.
Hindenburg Research published a damning report that alleged that the Adani Group had been involved in decades long stock price manipulation and accounting fraud.
This report came just before a planned share price sale for one of the companies in the Adani Group, the Adani Enterprises. This share sale or Initial Public Offering (IPO) is now suffering from underwhelming demand due to the report.
Gautam Adani made his fortune from investments in ports, airports, renewable energy and related industries. Adani is particularly close to the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
Gautam Adani’s fortune was estimated at $96.7 billion in 2023 by Forbes.
The Adani Group has released a rebuttal to the fraud claims but this seemed not to have calmed investors as the share price kept sliding downwards today in the Indian stock market. On Monday, January 30, the losses had catapulted to $65billion
In the last three years, the Adani Group shares have risen over 1,500% which resulted in massive increases in the fortune of Gautam Adani, who then stood at number three in the Forbes list of richest persons in the world.
Now, he is down to number eight on the list. How much lower can he go with the share price slide and what are the long term effects on the Adani Group? Only time can tell.
