Sri Lanka’s new leader on Thursday backed a controversial IMF bailout, marking a U-turn from his election pledge to renegotiate the deal secured by his predecessor.Leftist President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who tightened his grip on power last week after winning a huge majority in the legislature following his own victory in September, vowed to maintain the IMF programme.The $2.9 billion loan secured early last year required Colombo to sharply raise taxes, remove generous energy subsidies and agree to restructure more than 50 loss-making state enterprises.Dissanayake’s National People’s Power party had said it did not agree with the International Monetary Fund’s debt assessment and would renegotiate the bailout programme.But in his first address to the new parliament, where his party enjoys a two-thirds majority, Dissanayake said the economic recovery was too fragile to take risks.”The economy is in such a state that it cannot take the slightest shock… there is no room to make mistakes,” he said as he ruled out negotiations with either the IMF or creditors.”This is not the time to discuss if the terms are good or bad, if the agreement is favourable to us or not… The process had taken about two years and we cannot start all over again,” he said.The delayed third review of the four-year loan programme could be concluded by this weekend, with the finance ministry holding talks with a visiting IMF delegation in Colombo, he added.Sri Lanka expects the next tranche of about $330 million following an early approval from the board of the international lender of last resort.Dissanayake’s interim cabinet last month signed off on a controversial restructuring of $14.7 billion in foreign commercial credit tentatively agreed by predecessor Ranil Wickremesinghe.The debt restructuring is a key IMF demand to rebuild the island’s economy, which suffered its worst crisis in 2022 when it shrank 7.8 percent.

The business empire of Gautam Adani is again in turmoil after the billionaire Indian tycoon was charged in the United States with paying exorbitant bribes to secure lucrative government contracts.- Who is Gautam Adani? -Adani, 62, is a publicity-shy school dropout of humble origins who rose to become fabulously rich.Moving to Mumbai in his teens to work sorting diamonds, he formed his own import-export business. His big break came in 1995 when he acquired a shipping port just as India’s economy was opening up.Today, Adani Group has interests in everything from power generation and Australian coal mines to cement, media, food, airport terminals and Israeli ports.The meteoric rise in the share prices of Adani’s units — the flagship Adani Enterprises rose more than 1,000 percent in five years — helped make the conglomerate staggeringly wealthy and fund further expansion.- What is his relationship with the government? -Adani is considered a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a fellow Gujarat native.The tycoon’s conglomerate offered Modi the use of a private company jet during the 2014 election campaign that swept his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to office.Two years ago, Adani executed a hostile takeover of broadcaster NDTV, a television news service considered one of the few media outlets willing to outwardly criticise Modi.Adani batted away press freedom fears, but told the Financial Times that journalists should have the “courage” to say “when the government is doing the right thing every day”.Critics, including Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, have accused Adani of improperly benefitting from his relationship with Modi to win business and avoid proper oversight — allegations Adani Group and its founder have consistently denied.- Why has he been charged? -Wednesday’s indictment in New York accuses Adani Group’s leadership of paying more than $250 million to Indian government officials to secure lucrative contracts worth more than $2 billion.It further charges Adani and seven other officials with lying about the bribery in order to raise capital from international investors, including those in the United States. “These offences were allegedly committed by senior executives and directors to obtain and finance massive state energy supply contracts through corruption and fraud at the expense of US investors,” US Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lisa Miller said in a statement. The indictment accuses Adani of personally meeting with an Indian government official to “advance” the bribery scheme, and of meeting with other defendants to “discuss aspects of its execution”. – What is the reaction in India? -Adani Group acknowledged the charges against its founder and several others on Thursday when it cancelled a US bond sale it initiated just hours before the indictment was published. But it has not otherwise commented on the allegations against the tycoon or his subordinates, none of whom have been taken into custody. Modi’s government has likewise yet to comment, but BJP spokesman Amit Malviya said in a statement on social media platform X that the indictment appeared to implicate opposition parties, rather than the prime minister’s. Jairam Ramesh, of India’s key opposition Congress Party, said the indictment “vindicates” their demand for a parliamentary inquiry into Adani.He added that the indictment demonstrated what he called the “abject failure” of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to properly investigate Adani Group in the past.- Has Adani Group faced scrutiny before? -Last year, Hindenburg Research — an activist US investment group that bets on stocks falling — accused Adani Group of committing “a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades”.This included funnelling money from offshore accounts controlled by Adani’s brother, Vinod Adani, into listed units to inflate their share prices.The Hindenburg report has sparked a huge sell-off in shares in Adani’s firms, wiping out more than $150 billion in market value in the following weeks.Adani’s finance chief dismissed the report as a “malicious combination of selective misinformation and stale, baseless and discredited allegations that have been tested and rejected by India’s highest courts”.

Billionaire Indian industrialist Gautam Adani, whose business empire has been rocked by US bribery charges against him, is one of the corporate world’s great survivors.The tycoon — a close ally of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi — oversees a vast conglomerate encompassing coal, airports, cement and media operations.The US court charges that he paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes sent his companies’ shares plunging. But Adani has seen off big threats before.On New Year’s Day in 1998, Adani and an associate were reportedly kidnapped by gunmen demanding a $1.5 million ransom, before being later released at an unknown location.A decade later, he was dining at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace hotel when it was besieged by militants, who killed 160 people in one of India’s worst terror attacks.Trapped with hundreds of others, Adani reportedly hid in the basement all night before he was rescued by security personnel early the next morning.”I saw death at a distance of just 15 feet,” he said of the experience after his private aircraft landed in his hometown Ahmedabad later that day.Adani, 62, differs from his peers among India’s mega-rich, many of whom are known for throwing lavish birthday and wedding celebrations that are later splashed across newspaper gossip pages. A self-described introvert, he keeps a low profile and rarely speaks to the media, often sending lieutenants to front corporate events. “I’m not a social person that wants to go to parties,” he told the Financial Times in a 2013 interview.- ‘Stop Adani’ -Adani was born in Ahmedabad, Gujarat state, to a middle-class family but dropped out of school at 16 and moved to financial capital Mumbai to find work in the lucrative gems trade. After a short stint in his brother’s plastics business, he launched the flagship family conglomerate that bears his name in 1988 by branching out into the export trade. His big break came seven years later with a contract to build and operate a commercial shipping port in Gujarat.It grew to become India’s largest at a time when most ports were government-owned — the legacy of a sclerotic economic planning system that impeded growth for decades and was in the process of being dismantled.Adani in 2009 expanded into coal, a lucrative sector for a country still almost totally dependent on fossil fuels to meet its energy needs, but a decision that brought greater international scrutiny as he rose rapidly up India’s rich list. His purchase the following year of an untapped coal basin sparked years of “Stop Adani” protests in Australia after dismay at the project’s monumental environmental impact. Similar controversies plagued his coal projects in central India, where forests home to tribal communities were cut down for mining operations.- ‘Extraordinary growth’ -Adani is considered to be close to Prime Minister Modi, a fellow Gujarat native, and offered the leader the use of a private company jet during the 2014 election campaign that swept him to power. The tycoon has invested in the government’s strategic priorities, in recent years inaugurating a green energy business with ambitious targets.In 2022, he completed a hostile takeover of broadcaster NDTV, a television news service considered one of the few media outlets willing to outwardly criticise Modi.Adani batted away press freedom fears, but told the Financial Times that journalists should have the “courage” to say “when the government is doing the right thing every day”.Last year a bombshell report from US investment firm Hindenburg Research claimed the conglomerate had engaged in a “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades”.Hindenburg said a pattern of “government leniency towards the group” stretching back decades had left investors, journalists, citizens and politicians unwilling to challenge its conduct “for fear of reprisal”. Adani Group denied wrongdoing and characterised the report as a “calculated attack on India” but lost $150 billion in market capitalisation in the weeks after the report’s release.Its founder saw his own net worth plunge by $60 billion over the same period, and he is now ranked by Forbes as the 25th-richest person globally.US prosecutors on Wednesday charged the tycoon and two other board members with paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes and hiding the payments from investors.The indictment accuses Adani Group’s leadership of bribing Indian government officials to secure lucrative government contracts. The conglomerate and its founder have yet to respond to the charges.

Shares in India’s Adani Enterprises slumped 20 percent at Thursday’s open after US prosecutors charged billionaire industrialist founder Gautam Adani with paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes and hiding the payments from investors.The steep losses in the Adani group’s main listed entity were matched by abrupt sell-offs and trading halts in its other publicly traded businesses, with Adani Power losing 11 percent and Adani Energy Solutions tanking 20 percent.The conglomerate’s founder, a close ally of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi who was at one point the world’s second-richest man, is alleged to have agreed to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials for lucrative solar energy supply contracts.The deals were projected to generate more than $2 billion in profits after tax over roughly 20 years.None of the multiple defendants in the case, including Adani, are in custody.A statement from Adani Group’s renewable energy subsidiary acknowledged the charges against Adani and two other board members in a brief statement. Adani Green Energy said it had decided to halt a planned bond sale “in light of these developments”, but did not offer further comment on the allegations. Founder Gautam and two other board members are accused in the indictment of orchestrating “an elaborate scheme to bribe Indian government officials to secure contracts worth billions of dollars”, US attorney Breon Peace said in a statement.The trio “lied about the bribery scheme as they sought to raise capital from US and international investors”, he added.With a business empire spanning coal, airports, cement and media, the Adani Group has weathered previous corporate fraud allegations and suffered a similar stock crash last year.The conglomerate saw $150 billion wiped from its market value in 2023 after a bombshell report by short-seller Hindenburg Research accused it of “brazen” corporate fraud.It claimed Adani Group had engaged in a “stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades”.The report also said a pattern of “government leniency towards the group” stretching back decades, had left investors, journalists, citizens and politicians unwilling to challenge its conduct “for fear of reprisal”.Gautam Adani, the family-run conglomerate’s founder, denied Hindenburg’s original allegations and called its report a “deliberate attempt” to damage its image for the benefit of short-sellers.He saw his net worth shrink by around $60 billion in the two weeks following the release of the report and he is currently ranked by Forbes as the world’s 25th-richest person.- ‘Abject failure’ -Adani is considered a close associate of Prime Minister Modi, and opposition parties and other critics have long claimed their relationship helped him to unfairly win business and avoid proper oversight.Adani Group’s rapid expansion into capital-intensive businesses has also raised alarms in the past, with Fitch subsidiary and market researcher CreditSights warning in 2022 that it was “deeply over-leveraged.”Jairam Ramesh, of India’s key opposition Congress Party, said Thursday that the indictment “vindicates” their demand for a parliamentary inquiry into Adani.Ramesh condemned what he called the “abject failure” of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to hold the Adani Group “to account for the source of its investments”.Adani, born to a middle-class family in Ahmedabad, Gujarat state, dropped out of school at 16 and moved to the financial capital Mumbai to find work in the city’s lucrative gem trade. After a short stint in his brother’s plastics business, he launched the flagship family conglomerate that bears his name in 1988 by branching out into the export trade.