A US judge dropped 3 of 5 charges against Gautam Adani, then spent 47 pages criticizing why
The Justice Department asked for the dismissal itself. The judge granting it isn't happy about how they did it.
US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis dismissed three of the five criminal counts against Gautam Adani on Monday, closing out a chunk of a bribery and fraud case that had run since 2024. Adani had been accused of agreeing to bribe Indian officials to secure approval for a solar energy project, then misleading American investors about the conglomerate's anti-corruption safeguards. The Justice Department asked for the dismissal itself, arguing in a July filing that the case was primarily foreign, hard to prove, and no longer consistent with its priorities.
Garaufis didn't just grant the request. He used a 47-page ruling to take apart how the Justice Department handled it, placing the blame squarely on one senior official. He also held back on two of the five counts, saying prosecutors hadn't met the procedural bar needed to drop those outright. So this isn't really a clean win. It's a case that's mostly gone, attached to a judge publicly unhappy about why.
Watch what happens to the remaining two counts, since the judge hasn't signed off on dropping those yet. And watch whether this ruling becomes a talking point in the US about how the current administration handles cases involving foreign business figures, since that's clearly what irritated the judge in the first place.