On January 24, 2023, the American short-seller Hindenburg Research published a report accusing Gautam Adani’s conglomerate of stock manipulation, and the damage was immediate and immense: by the account of the Samvada World analytical site, the Adani Group’s market value crashed by more than $150 billion as panicked investors kept selling. The group answered with denials, calling the allegations “baseless” and “malicious”, but as that outlet tells it, the crisis of confidence could not be contained.
The rupee-scale arithmetic of the rout, and of the fight back, is stark in Business Today’s one-year review. The group’s total market capitalisation stood at Rs 19.19 lakh crore the day the report landed, sank to a trough of Rs 6.81 lakh crore, and had climbed back to roughly Rs 14.5 lakh crore by January 24, 2024. Recovery was uneven: Adani Power gained 89 percent over the year, Adani Ports 47 percent and Ambuja Cements 6 percent, while other group stocks rebounded between 22 and 275 percent from their lows yet still trailed their pre-report levels.
The regulatory machinery moved around the wreckage. Adani Enterprises pushed through its Rs 20,000-crore follow-on public offer by January 31, 2023, seen by some as a vote of nerve. After a public interest petition, the Supreme Court in March 2023 told the market regulator SEBI to hurry its probes and seated a six-member expert committee, whose first report found no apparent manipulation by the group. SEBI got extensions into August 14, 2023, then reported most investigations complete save two cases tied to foreign portfolio investments.
The counter-offensive ran on two tracks. In January 2024 the Supreme Court dismissed SEBI’s plea to hand the matter to the Central Bureau of Investigation, ruling the regulator itself had jurisdiction; Gautam Adani welcomed what he called the legal clarity. Hindenburg, for its part, disclosed in July 2024 that it had made about $4 million on its short positions, and in August 2024 accused Madhabi Puri Buch, who chairs SEBI, and her husband of putting money into an offshore fund linked to the group, allegations both SEBI and Adani rejected as recycled. Later claims retold by Samvada World, citing Ontario court documents, alleged the Anson hedge fund shared research used by Hindenburg, with Anson’s head Moez Kassam saying his firm had shared work “with a wide variety of sources”.
By mid-2024 the stocks had recovered enough that analysts read resilience, not ruin: Cantor Fitzgerald opened coverage of Adani Enterprises in January 2024 with a Rs 4,368 target, and mutual funds lifted their stake in the company from 1.19 to 1.49 percent over the year. Hindenburg itself closed in January 2025, its founder Nate Anderson saying the firm had “stood for financial transparency” as the legal weight of defending its methods proved too much.
Sources
- Adani Enterprises: Here’s what to expect from Adani group shares a year after Hindenburg report – BusinessToday
- The Hindenburg-Adani Saga: Allegations, Market Shock, and Resilience Samvada World
