Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli, a businessman based in the UAE, is in the eye of a storm that threatens to engulf the Adani group.
Ahli is one of two “shadowy figures” who have been identified as large investors in Adani group stocks through investment funds housed in Bermuda and Mauritius in an investigative report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
Ahli’s co-conspirator was a Taiwanese businessman Chang Chung-Ling whose name figured in the Hindenburg report.
Both Ahli and Chang are closely linked to Vinod Adani, the elder brother of Gautam Adani, and may have acted as fronts while funnelling money into Adani stocks.
The OCCRP report is based on a trove of documents that the investigative journalists were able to unearth.
These included files from multiple tax havens, bank records and internal Adani group emails.
In one sense, the ease with which they found these documents serves to only put market regulator Sebi’s nose out of joint.
In its recent statement on the status report relating to the Hindenburg report, Sebi said it had been able to unearth adequate information from several global tax havens to conclude whether there had been a violation of the public float rules.
“As many of the entities linked to these foreign investors are located in tax haven jurisdictions, establishing the economic interest shareholders of the 12 FPIs remains a challenge,” the regulator had said, adding that it was hoping to gather details from five unnamed jurisdictions.
Sebi officials had provided a lot of information on its investigation to the Supreme Court-appointed panel of experts which had been asked to determine whether there had been any lapses by the regulator in capturing the identities of investors routing money.
The expert panel’s report elaborated a little on what Sebi had been able to unearth. The report said: “Sebi found 42 contributories to the assets under management of the 13 overseas entities.” It added that it was pursuing other avenues to confirm the information.
The two funds named by OCCRP — Emerging India Focus Fund (EIFF) and EM Resurgent Fund (EMRF) — are among the 13 overseas entities that Sebi is investigating.
The experts’ panel report carries a table that gives some details about the controlling shareholders of the two funds.
Sebi has found that the controlling shareholder of the two funds is Emerging India Fund Management Ltd which is, in turn, held by the Emerging Fund Trust. The beneficial owner of both funds is given as Trident Trust Company as trustee and Jimmy Ernesta as the settler.
This doesn’t square with what OCCRP has found. The documents that it unearthed showed that Chang and Ahli accounted for a large percentage of the money invested in the two Mauritian funds between 2013 and 2018.
It went on to claim that in June 2016 — at the peak of their investment — the two funds held between 8 per cent and 14 per cent in four Adani group companies: Adani Enterprises, Adani Power, Adani Ports and Adani Transmission.
It now transpires that the two funds no longer hold any Adani shares which were sold in 2018.
The two funds have a new manager now: 360 ONE Asset Management (Mauritius) Limited.
In a statement issued on Thursday, 360 ONE Asset Management claimed it had no connection with the Adani group or “the individuals mentioned in the FT article (Chang and Ahli)”.
