Here's what got the Adani case dismissed

A US federal court has dismissed with prejudice the criminal charges against Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani and former Adani Green CEO Vneet Jaain, closing nearly two years of proceedings over an alleged $250 million bribery-for-contracts scheme. The dismissal is final. The reasoning behind it is not the vindication it is being read as.

Judge Nicholas Garaufis granted the Justice Department's Rule 48(a) motion, but only after requiring prosecutors to publicly justify their reasons for abandoning the case and requiring the defendants to file sworn declarations ruling out any quid pro quo behind the decision. That procedural insistence is itself unusual — courts ordinarily defer heavily to prosecutorial discretion under Rule 48(a), and Garaufis's own order acknowledges that judicial review of such decisions is limited. The added scrutiny suggests the court was conscious of how the dismissal would be read.

The DOJ offered three grounds for dropping the case. The first was jurisdictional: that the alleged conduct occurred predominantly in India and carried significant US securities-law risk on that basis. Garaufis rejected this. The indictment itself, he noted, alleged that investor funds were committed in the United States and that the relevant transactions moved through the US financial system — undercutting the government's own argument for why the case should not proceed here.

The second ground concerned the absence of alleged deception directed at sophisticated investors. The court found this insufficiently supported, though it did not need to resolve the question, since the third ground was enough on its own.

That third ground — puffery — is where the dismissal actually rests. The court accepted that Adani Green's public statements about its anti-bribery and compliance policies were broad enough to qualify as "inactionable puffery," the kind of statement no reasonable investor could treat as a specific representation of fact. On that narrow basis alone, the three securities and wire fraud conspiracy counts were dismissed.

What the order does not do is adjudicate the underlying allegations. No witnesses were examined. No evidence was tested at trial. Garaufis was explicit that the dismissal does not constitute a finding on the conduct alleged in the indictment. He also addressed, directly, whether Adani's November 2024 pledge to invest $10 billion in the United States had any bearing on the DOJ's decision to drop the case — and stated he was satisfied that it had not. That a judge felt the need to say so is itself a data point.

The DOJ's own submission characterised the original indictment — filed in the closing weeks of the Biden administration — as a politically motivated "name and shame" exercise with little realistic prospect of reaching trial. The court's order does not endorse that characterisation. It accepts a narrower, technical basis for dismissal while rejecting the government's central jurisdictional theory outright.

In parallel, the SEC's civil action against Gautam Adani concluded through a consent judgment requiring a $6 million penalty, entered without any admission of the underlying allegations — the same structural pattern as the criminal dismissal: resolution without adjudication.

The distinction matters beyond this case. Dismissal with prejudice is a genuine and permanent legal outcome for the defendants. But the court's rejection of the government's jurisdictional argument, combined with its explicit refusal to make findings on the merits, leaves the broader legal question — how US securities law reaches conduct alleged to have occurred substantially abroad — unresolved rather than settled in Adani's favour.