TheChek News Flow

Pranav Adani seeks settlement with India’s markets regulator over allegations linked to energy company acquisition

A nephew of Indian infrastructure tycoon Gautam Adani has denied violating laws against insider trading, saying he is seeking to settle allegations made by the country’s capital markets regulator.

News of the accusations against Pranav Adani, who sits as a director on multiple companies in the sprawling Adani Group, is likely to add to scrutiny of the conglomerate’s controlling family after its billionaire founder was criminally charged in the US last year.

The case relates to the acquisition of SB Energy, a solar and wind power producer then backed by Japanese tech group SoftBank and Indian telecoms billionaire Sunil Mittal, by Adani Group’s renewable energy arm in 2021, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Reuters news agency reported earlier on Friday that the Securities and Exchange Board of India had last year sent a notice to Pranav Adani alleging he shared information about the deal, prior to its public announcement. The Mumbai-based regulator did not respond to a request for comment.

Pranav Adani said in a statement that he had filed a settlement application “to put an end to the matter, without admission or denial of the allegations”.

“I categorically state that I have not violated any securities laws including the insider trading regulations,” he added. “The regulations relating to insider trading have been complied with, by me in law and spirit.”

The SB Energy deal had a $3.5bn enterprise valuation and was labelled India’s largest ever green energy acquisition.

The accusations against one of the Adani family’s inner circle surfaced just as the conglomerate was regrouping after US authorities late last year charged its chair Gautam Adani and seven others, including another nephew, Sagar Adani, over an alleged renewable energy bribery scheme.

Adani Group has dismissed the US charges as “baseless”.

The allegations against Pranav Adani cast a pall over the commissioning of an Adani deepwater port in the southern Indian state of Kerala on Friday, an event presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Modi has been criticised by Indian opposition parties for his perceived closeness to Gautam Adani. Both the prime minister and tycoon have denied any undue favouritism.

The conglomerate has been exploring a revival of plans to invest billions of dollars into American projects following Donald Trump’s re-election, the Financial Times has reported.

It also attracted funding from the likes of BlackRock and a half-dozen US and European investors in a $750mn private placement bond issue last month.

Why robots are not the answer to US manufacturing reshoring hopes

Significant time, cost and shortages of skilled staff represent barriers to rapid acceleration in automation

From cars to iPhones to semiconductors, bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US is a cornerstone of Donald Trump’s economic agenda.

As the country’s factories struggle to find workers, with half a million jobs remaining unfilled in March, the Trump administration and some executives have envisaged robots taking up the slack.

Industry experts, however, are sceptical. Manufacturers are facing an uncertain economic climate, but the significant time, cost and the shortages of technically skilled workers are barriers to a rapid acceleration in automation.

“Companies can’t pivot on a dime,” said Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and chief scientist at US-based Ambi Robotics.

Cost is the biggest obstacle. While the price of industrial robots is rapidly declining, driven by Chinese manufacturers, a lower-priced type known as a “cobot” still retails for between $25,000 and $50,000.

The robot is also just a fraction of the expense of integrating automation into a factory. A robot that stacks goods on to pallets can cost up to $150,000 to install when sensors, safety fencing, conveyors and other infrastructure are taken into account, according to Jorg Hendrikx, chief executives of robotics marketplace Qviro.

Such costs put robotics out of the reach of many US manufacturers. Just 20 per cent of factories with between 50 and 150 employees have a robot, half the rate of those with more than 1,000 staff, according to the US Census Bureau.

Manufacturers are also constrained by the types of goods they produce, with robots often less economical in sectors where products change frequently, because of the required reprogramming or reconfiguration. Two in five industrial robots in the US are in the automotive sector, where lines often churn out the same high-value model year after year.

Large upfront capital expenditures, including in new facilities, will probably become less popular as the US’s economic outlook becomes more uncertain after Trump’s sweeping tariffs.

“A lot of businesses are going to put investments on hold, because you don’t know what the situation down the road will look like,” said Carl Benedikt Frey, a professor of AI and work at the Oxford Internet Institute.

“If you want to spend [on] automation, you need to be sure that this is a strategy that goes over many, many years,” said Susanne Bieller, general secretary of the International Federation of Robotics, which represents the industry.

Increased tariffs would be a “huge burden” for US companies seeking to purchase robots, she added. America relies on imports for finished robots and key components as all of the leading manufacturers, such as Switzerland’s ABB, Sino-German KUKA and Fanuc in Japan, are located outside of the US.

Experts are also critical of the “all-stick-and-no-carrot” approach the administration has taken to reshoring.

“Tariffs are punitive,” said Melonee Wise, chief product officer at humanoid robot maker Agility Robotics. “I don’t think that we’ll start seeing any kind of shift [to automation] without large or definitive incentivisation.”

Both China and South Korea have seen robot adoption surge well past the US as a result of huge government backing such as tax credits, subsidies and nationwide initiatives, such as Made in China 2025.

The US government has invested about $6bn in robotics R&D between 2018 and 2022, according to Public Spend Forum, a government research platform. However, it lacks a national robotics strategy and federal scientific research budgets are being slashed by the Trump administration.

Despite the hype around humanoid robots and those which will “self-learn” through integrated AI, these technologies were off the sophistication and price point where they could be widely deployed, said Bieller.

Increased automation will accelerate the need for workers with the skills to install and work with robotics, such as programming, systems design, engineering and maintenance, which are in global shortage.

“Manufacturers are struggling to hire qualified workers,” said Catherine Ross, a workforce development expert at the Association for Manufacturing Technology. “The education pipeline isn’t producing enough talent to meet industry needs.”

It was common for factories to have a “robot graveyard” where equipment had been mothballed because of a lack of expertise to upkeep it, said Saman Farid, chief executive and founder of “robotics-as-a-service” provider Formic.

Another complication for employers is the widespread labour union pushback against automation.

Unions representing workers as varied as delivery drivers, hotel staff and grocery store cashiers have increasingly fought to get provisions limiting the use of robots in their workplaces or requiring payouts to displaced workers. Dockworkers represented by the International Longshoremen’s Association went on strike at three dozen US ports over automation last year, costing the US economy billions. 

While proponents of automation says the trend is inevitable due to the lack of labour, they still warn that it is a long way off.

“I think it’s really important to set expectations . . . [robots are] not going to be able to do a lot of tasks in the near future,” Goldberg said. “It’s a very hard problem.”

The Strategy strategy will keep working until it doesn't

If there’s one company that has truly mastered the art of turning equity into cryptocurrency, it’s Strategy — formerly known as MicroStrategy. 

Yesterday, the company unveiled its latest gambit: a brand-new $21bn shelf registration to sell common stock via an at-the-market (ATM) offering, having only just burned through the previous $21bn shelf filed in late October 2024. At this rate, the Strategy juggernaut is picking up both momentum and mass and will likely keep doing so for as long as investors are willing to pay a premium to underwrite its crypto crusade. 

And what a crusade it is. Strategy now holds 553,555 bitcoins or 2.64 per cent of total supply, acquired at an average price of $68,459 apiece and currently worth over $53bn. That makes it the undisputed heavyweight champion of corporate bitcoin holders, a title it clearly has no intention of surrendering. 

Why stop now? As long as the market is willing to value Strategy’s shares at more than double the net asset value of its bitcoin stash, executive chair Michael Saylor will keep issuing stock to buy more. It’s a gloriously self-reinforcing loop: every share sold above NAV is, by definition, accretive. The arithmetic is brutally straightforward, and as long as the music plays, Strategy will keep dancing. 

It’s not just common stock, either. Strategy has been merrily tapping the capital markets with convertible bonds and not one but two flavours of preferred stock (dubbed “Strike” and “Strife”) to raise cash to binge on bitcoin. And there’s no reason to think the punchbowl is going away any time soon.

The sheer nerve of Strategy’s pivot — from a dusty enterprise software vendor to a bitcoin-gobbling machine — is frankly astonishing. Since August 2020, when Strategy first decided to bet the farm on crypto, its shares have surged more than 26-fold (that’s not a typo), even though its actual cumulative gain from its bitcoin investments is only 41 per cent. 

The world-beating stock price performance is not just a rerating; it’s a metamorphosis of almost cartoonish proportions. Some may scoff and say Strategy is little more than a leveraged bitcoin ETF wrapped in a corporate disguise, with a capital structure that subordinates the interests of its common stockholders, but try telling that to investors who’ve been surfing this wave since the beginning.

Of course, all of this financial engineering hinges on two rather large conditions: that bitcoin’s price stays elevated, and that the market continues to bless Strategy’s shares with a generous premium. The two are linked, of course — but should either falter, the virtuous loop could unravel with uncomfortable speed.

Whether this all amounts to genius or lunacy rather depends on your opinion of bitcoin itself. But whatever your take, the sheer chutzpah is undeniable. In the grand history of financial reinvention, Strategy’s transformation ranks among the most audacious — and, so far at least, one of the most lucrative. 

Just don’t ask what happens if bitcoin tanks, the premium evaporates, and Strategy has to rustle up cash to redeem that $1bn convertible bond due in 2028 (with an investor put option in September 2027). The company reported only $60.3mn of cash on its balance sheet at the end of the first quarter of 2025.

For now, though, with bitcoin flirting with $97,000 and investor appetite for Strategy’s stock showing no signs of waning, Strategy’s strategy is working. Investors keep betting on bitcoin as a hedge against dollar debasement and keep paying a hefty premium to access the Saylor spectacular.