The United States’ Department of Justice on Saturday told a New York court that it wanted to drop fraud charges against Adani Group chairperson Gautam Adani because the case is primarily a foreign one, difficult to establish and inconsistent with the agency’s current priorities, Reuters reported.

The department also said that the US “pretending to be the world police” could cause diplomatic strife and waste resources that would be better utilised on domestic concerns, The Hindu reported.

The US authorities had in November 2024 indicted Gautam Adani and his nephew Sagar Adani for allegedly orchestrating a $265 million fraud scheme to bribe officials in India for solar energy contracts, and then misrepresenting the company’s anti-bribery practices to investors in the US.

The details of the alleged bribes were concealed to secure financing, the US justice department had claimed.

The Adani Group has denied the allegations. In a stock exchange filing in November 2024, the conglomerate said that Gautam Adani and Sagar Adani had been charged in the US for securities fraud, not bribery.

However, on May 18, the Donald Trump administration asked the court to dismiss the fraud charges against Gautam Adani.

Judge Nicholas Garaufis at the US District Court in the Eastern District of New York had on June 26 directed the justice department to justify its decision to drop the charges.

In response, the Department of Justice claimed on Saturday that prosecutors under the previous Joe Biden administration had launched a baseless case against Gautam Adani that had no realistic prospect of reaching the stage of trial, Reuters reported.

The department contended that US government attorneys should not pursue a “foreign case” that involves no criminal organisations and no American companies, and has no bearing on national security.

“The alleged ‘payments’ in this case ‌were ⁠made by Indian nationals, working for Indian companies, to the Indian government, with no US interests implicated in any way,” Reuters quoted the filing as having stated.

The department said that the Indian authorities have already investigated several of the allegations in the case and found no actionable misconduct.

“So, the country with by far the strongest interest here seems to have concluded nothing inappropriate happened,” The Hindu quoted the department as having told the court.

The request to drop the charges came days after reports said that Gautam Adani’s lawyers had told the justice department that he would invest $10 billion in the country’s economy and help create 15,000 jobs if the charges against him were dropped, The New York Times reported.

On May 14, the newspaper reported that the justice department was planning to drop the charges against Gautam Adani after he hired a legal team led by Robert J Giuffra Jr, one of Trump’s personal lawyers.

Giuffra was said to have met officials at the justice department’s headquarters in Washington in April. He presented about 100 slides arguing that the prosecutors lacked evidence and jurisdiction in the matter, The New York Times quoted unidentified persons familiar with the meeting as saying.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.