The pre-payment will help billionaire Gautam Adani’s firm seek an extension of the debt taken to fund the acquisition by three years, the report added. Global banks had lent Adani $4.5 billion to finance the purchase of Holcim Ltd. cement assets, with the mezzanine loan due for maturity in September 2024.
The Adani Group in September 2022 completed the acquisition of Ambuja Cements and its subsidiary ACC Ltd from Switzerland’s Holcim Group for $6.4 billion.
The two cement makers together make Adani the second largest cement player in the Indian market only behind Aditya Birla Group’s UltraTech Cement.
US-based short-seller Hindenburg Research in January alleged malfeasance by the Indian conglomerate, which sent Adani stocks and bonds tumbling. Since then, the group has pre-paid about $2 billion of share-backed loans, made bond repayments on time and won another $1.9 billion investment from star investor Rajiv Jain of GQG Partners.
Adani started a polymers import-export business in the 1980s and gradually expanded into infrastructure.In the 1990s, he started building a port in Mundra, in his home state of Gujarat. He went on to add coal mines, power plants and airports to his portfolio. In the past decade, he secured one of his biggest international deals — the Carmichael project in Australia, one of the largest open-pit coal mining operations in the world.Last year, the Adani Group bought a cement business in India from Holcim, a multinational construction company based in Switzerland. In another sign of the diversification of his business, Adani took control of NDTV, an independent news outlet.
The Adani conglomerate’s success in some ways paralleled the growing Indian economy, which is now the fifth largest in the world. Adani, 68, has styled himself as an industrialist who is helping to address his country’s lack of infrastructure.
The billionaire has generally kept a low profile even as he has become one of the richest men in the world. He is a follower of the Jain religion, which emphasizes asceticism, and he and his family tightly control his conglomerate. (Hindenburg has criticized the ownership structure of his company.)
Months before Hindenburg made its allegations, the dizzying rise of an Adani subsidiary’s shares drew scrutiny. Much of the trading activity in the subsidiary, Adani Enterprises, was traced to holding companies based in tax havens, leading to speculation that the stock — which had helped propel Adani’s personal wealth — was being manipulated. Shares in Adani’s seven subsidiaries have soared more than 800% in the past three years, according to Hindenburg.
Previously, Adani’s company faced investigations into allegations of tax impropriety related to coal imports but was eventually cleared. Adani was also linked to an Indian stock market manipulation scam engineered by a Mumbai stockbroker, Ketan Parekh.
