The Adani group on Tuesday refuted the news report published by the Ken, a digital publication saying the publication is making baseless and deliberately mischievous claims that the group has not completed repayment of $ 2.15 billion in share-backed debt, the company announced through an exchange filing.
The group said, "Adani has completed full prepayment of margin linked share backed financing aggregating to $ 2.15 billion and all corresponding shares pledged for those facilities have been released."
In the exchange filing the company said that its pledge position comparison has reduced. Adani Green's pledge position has gone down to 3.5 per cent from the earlier 4.4 per cent on December 31, 2022, and the highest drop was in Adani Ports whose pledge position fell to 4.7 per cent from 17.3 per cent. Adani Transmission saw a fall to 3.8 per cent whereas Adani Enterprises fell from 2.7 per cent to 0.6 per cent.
After such repayment, ListCo pledge positions for Adani Green, Adani Ports, Adani Transmission & Adani Enterprises have reduced substantially, and only residual share pledges corresponding to Operating Company (OpCo) facilities remained outstanding.
Specific responses to the Ken's report
The report by The Ken said, "Over the last two months, the group has claimed to have repaid about $2.15 billion; it announced, on 12 March, that all of its margin-linked share-backed debt has been paid. However, regulatory filings examined by The Ken show that banks have not yet released a large portion of its promoters’ shares, as they should have if the loans had indeed been completely repaid. As per Indian laws, disclosures on the release of shares need to be filed with stock exchanges by lenders within two working days, and by promoters within seven working days. But neither the Adani Group nor the lenders have made these disclosures to stock exchanges."
In response Adani Group said that all the pledged shares were released subsequent to prepayment made. They also added that the same can be seen on the NSE website as the company as per the present rule needs to report it by system driven disclosure.
Responding to the report that said that the shares of Adani Green and Adani Transmission have not been released by banks the group said that as per rules disclosures need to be made only if there is a release of 5 per cent or higher number of shares which is why the company released a filing for Adani Ports but not for Adani Transmission and Adani Green Energy.
The company also said, "There has been incremental prepayment of $ 134 million completed after the press release of 6 Feb 2023 ($ 1,114 million) and 7Mar 2023 ($ 902 million), resulting in the updated debt figure of $ 2.15 billion for the press release of 12 Mar 2023.
