Hindenburg Research, the United States-based short-seller known for its investigative reports on several business entities such as the Adani Group, will be disbanded, its founder Nate Anderson said on Wednesday.

“As I’ve shared with family, friends and our team since late last year, I have made the decision to disband Hindenburg Research,” Anderson, who started the firm in 2017, said in a statement.

“The plan has been to wind up after we finished the pipeline of ideas we were working on,” he said. “And as of the last Ponzi cases we just completed and are sharing with regulators, that day is today.”

Short-selling entails borrowing a stock to sell it with the expectation that its price will fall. The equity shares are then repurchased at a lower price to profit from the difference.

However, Hindenburg Research did not manage client funds like other short-selling firms but bet against companies that it suspected of accounting irregularities, fraud or mismanagement. This was done after conducting an investigation and publishing reports about such suspected misconduct.

Anderson said that there was no specific reason for disbanding Hindenburg Research. “No particular threat, no health issue, and no big personal issue,” the statement said. However, he highlighted that the toll of the “rather intense, and at times, all-encompassing” nature of the work done by the firm.

“We shook some empires that we felt needed shaking,” he added.

The investigations undertaken by Hindenburg Research included its work on the Adani Group. In January 2023, it accused the conglomerate of pulling off the “largest con in corporate history” through accounting fraud and money laundering.

The Adani Group rejected these allegations, but the report pummelled the stocks of its listed companies and wiped out $111 billion of investors’ money at the time. It also led to regulatory and legal investigations against the conglomerate.

In November, indictment proceedings were initiated against industrialist Gautam Adani, founder of the Adani Group, in the United States in a multibillion-dollar bribery and fraud scheme related to the conglomerate’s solar projects in India.

On November 27, the Adani Group said that Gautam Adani and his nephew Sagar Adani had been charged in the United States for securities fraud, not bribery.

In August, Hindenburg Research had also alleged that Securities and Exchange Board of India chief Madhabi Puri Buch and her husband Dhaval Buch had “hidden stakes” in offshore entities tied to alleged stock price manipulation and money laundering by the Adani Group.

Madhabi and Dhaval Buch denied the allegations.

The market regulator, led by Madhabi Buch, had “drawn a blank” in its investigation of the allegations against the Adani Group in 2023 and told a Supreme Court-appointed committee that further enquiry could be a “journey without a destination”.

In 2020, Hindenburg Research went after electric truck manufacturer Nikola. The short-seller claimed that the company had misled investors about its technological developments.

A promotional video produced by Nikola, showing its electric truck cruising at high speed, was false as the vehicle was in reality rolling down a hill, the short-seller claimed.

In 2022, Nikola’s founder Trevor Milton was convicted in the United States on charges of fraud.