Embattled Adani Embarks On A Coal Fire Sale To Boost Liquidity

India’s conglomerate Adani is offering coal cargoes at a discount to benchmarks in a move suggesting that the group’s traders are eager to sell the coal quickly and potentially boost the liquidity at Adani Group, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg on Thursday.

The giant industrial conglomerate Adani has had a difficult few weeks after a short seller’s report accused the group of gross market manipulations, leading to a massive wipeout of the market capitalizations of the group’s listed units.

Indian authorities started an investigation into the downfall of Gautam Adani’s Adani Enterprises after a report from Hindenburg Research, a U.S. short-seller firm, triggered a 60% stock market value loss in the past weeks.

Last month, Hindenburg accused Adani Group of “pulling the largest con in corporate history,” having “engaged in a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades.”

The Adani Group has dismissed the claims as a “malicious combination of selective misinformation and stale, baseless and discredited allegations.”  

Adani Group, which owes part of its wealth to coal mines and coal-fired power stations, is now offering to sell cargoes of coal from Australia and Indonesia at around a 4% discount to the benchmark in Asia, according to Bloomberg’s sources.

Although Adani is not the only coal seller offering cargoes at discounts, the group seems eager to sell quickly the cargoes, the sources told Bloomberg.

At the end of 2021, Adani Group said it planned to invest $70 billion by 2030 in its green energy operations to become the largest producer of renewable energy in the world. 

French supermajor TotalEnergies, which has several joint ventures and investments with Adani in India, said earlier this week it hadn’t signed yet a planned partnership deal for the production of green hydrogen with Adani.

TotalEnergies awaits the results of audits that Adani started after the Hindenburg Research report, the French group’s CEO Patrick Pouyanne said on Wednesday.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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