Gautam Adani’s secretive older brother Vinod is worth nearly $10 billion, a fortune that Forbes recently uncovered while investigating a maze of shell companies.
By Giacomo Tognini and John Hyatt
U
ntil recently, few people outside India’s business elite had heard of Vinod Adani, Gautam’s older brother. That changed after Hindenburg Research issued a report in January that accused Vinod of market manipulation and money laundering. In the wake of those allegations, Forbes unearthed dozens of offshore records that put the 74-year-old at the center of multiple questionable transactions and uncovered his massive fortune of $9.8 billion, nearly all of it in shares of Adani Group companies and previously attributed to Gautam.
Vinod Adani owns three properties in Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, according to Dubai property records.
Laszlo Szirtesi/Getty Images
Vinod controls that fortune through a network of eight companies based in the United Arab Emirates and the tiny Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius. He also owns—or has been associated with—at least 60 shell companies registered in far-flung tax havens, including the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Cyprus and Singapore.
These offshore entities have been at the center of some of the Adani Group’s most high-profile deals. When French oil major TotalEnergies bought a 20% stake in publicly traded Adani Green Energy in January 2021, it didn’t buy the shares directly on the open market. Instead, TotalEnergies acquired two firms in Mauritius—both owned by Vinod—that held the shares. Last September, when the Adani Group spent $6.5 billion to buy stakes in two Indian cement companies from Swiss firm Holcim, it didn’t invest directly—instead, the deal was carried out entirely by a Mauritius firm owned by Vinod and his wife.
Forbes found numerous questionable or confusing transactions involving Vinod’s offshore companies. One of his Singapore businesses, for instance, borrowed money from Russian bank VTB in 2020; the loan was backed by two of Vinod’s offshore vehicles, which hold $4.7 billion of shares in Adani Group companies. The companies didn’t disclose any share pledges in Indian stock market filings, a potential violation of Indian securities law.
Despite orchestrating these deals, Vinod holds no formal position within the Adani Group. In response to the Hindenburg report, the group claimed Vinod “has no role in day-to-day affairs.” The company has occasionally disclosed that he is part of its “promoter group,” a term used in Indian securities filings to indicate a relative or associate of the main shareholder, in this case Gautam. Neither Vinod nor the Adani Group responded to repeated requests for comment from Forbes.
Vinod has all the trappings of a character in an Ian Fleming novel. There is virtually no trace of him online, and he is known to go by two different names: In 1995, according to documents revealed in the Panama Papers investigation, he requested that his name be changed to Vinod Shantilal Shah from Vinod Shantilal Adani. Holder of a Cypriot passport, he owns an apartment in Singapore and 37 residential and commercial properties in Dubai worth an estimated $21 million, including a luxe pad in the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. The Dubai property records, which date from 2020, were obtained by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., that researches international crime and conflict, which then shared the findings with Forbes.
While his brother gives speeches and hobnobs with politicians, Vinod stays in the shadows. “I’ve always thought it was a partnership,” says Tim Buckley, an Australian investment banker turned climate finance advocate who has studied the Adani Group. “Gautam was the warm, cuddly, friendly public face, and Vinod was the mastermind in the private tax haven, the real puppet master.”