New Delhi: US President Donald Trump paused the enforcement of a law that makes it illegal for some entities to bribe foreign government officials and under which prosecutors have charged certain individuals in the bribery and fraud case involving Gautam Adani.
Meanwhile, a group of Republican federal legislators reportedly wrote to the US attorney general saying that the case against Adani and others involves no real injury to American interests and risks damaging ties with India.
Trump’s executive order dated Monday (February 10) pauses for 180 days the implementation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
No new investigations or enforcement actions under the law should be taken during this time unless the attorney general makes an exception.
The attorney general must also review “all existing FCPA investigations or enforcement actions” and act “with respect to such matters to restore proper bounds on FCPA enforcement”, the executive order reads.
The FCPA prohibits companies and people with links to the US from bribing foreign government officials for business gain. It is also a crime for entities to mislead investors about compliance with the FCPA.
In November, US federal prosecutors accused Adani Group officials, including chairman Adani, of involvement in offering and promising over Rs 2,000 crore in bribes to Indian government officials in furtherance of a solar power purchase agreement.
The Adani Group called the allegations “baseless”.
Under the indictment, five people were charged with conspiracy to violate the FCPA. Two of them were former executives of Azure Power, a renewable energy firm with securities that had traded in the US, while the rest were former employees of a Canadian investor.
A fact-sheet released by the White House on Monday said that an “overenforcement” of the FCPA was harming US companies by barring them from “engaging in practices common among international competitors, creating an uneven playing field”.
Also on Monday, five Republican lawmakers of the US Congress wrote to attorney general Pam Bondi regarding some “unwise decisions” taken by the Biden administration; they elaborated that one such decision was its pursuing the aforementioned case against Adani, PTI reported.
The five lawmakers, namely Lance Gooden, Pat Fallon, Mike Haridopolos, Brandon Gill, William R. Timmons and Brian Babin, said its pursuit of the case was “questionable”.
“This case rests on the allegation that preparations were made by members of this company in India to bribe Indian officials, also exclusively located in India,” PTI quoted the legislators as saying.
They added: “Instead of deferring the case to the appropriate Indian authorities, the Biden DOJ [Department of Justice] decided to push forward and indict the company’s executives without any real injury to US interests being present.”
Not only was there no injury to US interests present, the Biden government’s pursuing this case “demonstrates more harm for America’s interests than good, if any”, they said in their letter as per PTI.
“This misguided crusade came at the risk of harming our relationship with a strategic geopolitical partner like India immediately preceding President Trump’s return to the Oval Office,” the quintet also wrote, adding to describe US-India ties as ‘sharing a sense of mutual respect and appreciation’.
The developments came days ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Washington.
Daniel Richman, a former US federal prosecutor, had told the Financial Times that the timing of the indictment – two months before the Biden administration was to give up the reins – could have been “an effort to get the nature of the charges out … before the change of administration”.
