'Baseless And Deliberately Mischievous': Adani On Digital Publication's Claim On Loan Repayment Against Shares

Adani Group said the firm has completed full prepayment of margin-linked share-backed financing totaling to $2.15 billion and all corresponding shares pledged for those facilities have been released

Adani Group on Tuesday denied a news report published by The Ken, a digital publication, which claims that the conglomerate has not repaid its $2.15 billion share-backed debt.  

In a press release, Adani Group has strongly refuted these charges stating this claim as baseless and deliberately mischievous. In its reply, Adani Group said that the firm has completed full prepayment of margin-linked share-backed financing totaling to $2.15 billion and all corresponding shares pledged for those facilities have been released.

According to the release, The Ken pointed out that banks had not yet released a large portion of Adani Group's promoters' shares, as they should have if the loans had indeed been completely repaid.

According to The Ken's examination of Substantial Acquisition of Shares and Takeovers (SAST) disclosures, after Adani's prepayment announcement, banks had only released the pledged shares of Adani Ports & SEZ. The pledged shares of Adani Green and Adani Transmission had not been released by banks even a month after the loan repayment, which it claimed was highly unusual.

The group clarified that the SEBI SAST regulations only applied to Adani Ports and not to Adani Transmission and Adani Green Energy. Therefore, only Adani Ports' disclosure had been filed as per SEBI SAST regulations.

It also mentioned that incremental prepayments of $134 million had been completed after the press release of February 6 2023 ($1,114 million) and March 7 2023 ($902 million), resulting in an updated debt figure of $2.15 billion for the press release of March 12, 2023.

The group said that all the pledged shares have been released subsequent to prepayments made billion (see our media release of 12 Mar 2023).

“As per the present rules, any share pledge or release is automatically reported by system driven disclosure (SDD) mechanism of the depository participant, and no separate filing is required to be made. The same has already been updated and is reflected on the NSE website. However, the BSE website has not been updated to reflect the same,” Adani Group stated.