Gautam Adani allegedly bribed Indian government officials to secure a twelve-gigawatt solar contract, then sold that contract to American investors as though the bribes did not exist. The United States Department of Justice has reviewed the indictment for conspiracy, securities fraud, wire fraud, and a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and decided it has better things to do.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn asked Judge Nicholas Garaufis to dismiss the criminal charges in their entirety. They cited prosecutorial discretion, the fact that Adani never set foot in the United States, and the prior settlement of the S.E.C.’s related civil case. The Department called it prosecutorial discretion. The rest of us are entitled to call it what it is. The F.C.P.A. — the federal statute written specifically to make sure a company cannot pay foreign officials to win contracts and then bring the resulting deals home to American investors as clean — had, by then, been suspended in its enforcement by the President. The lawyers consented. The judge still has to sign.
This is the machine, and it is not a glitch. The F.C.P.A. was the law. The S.E.C. was the gatekeeper. The Department of Justice was the prosecutor. All three were built, in principle, to make sure the man who pays the bribe in New Delhi and the man who sells the contract on Wall Street answer to the same country. This week, the same country declined to ask. If you steal a car, you face a mandatory minimum. If you bribe a foreign power and defraud American markets, the system discovers a sudden, absolute exhaustion of resources. The photovoltaic prince is simply too big, too distant, and too well-connected to be bothered with a trial.
I have watched this movie since the savings and loan crisis, and the pattern is flawless. When H.S.B.C. admitted laundering money for Mexican drug cartels and sanctioned regimes in Iran and Sudan, the bank wrote a $1.9 billion check and not a single executive saw the inside of a courtroom — Senator Grassley called it a “get-out-of-jail-free card,” and he was being polite. When Wells Fargo opened millions of unauthorized accounts under sales-quota pressure, the bank settled for $3 billion, the Department noted, “with the bank itself, not with any individuals responsible for the fraud.” When Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty, twice, on charges of pushing OxyContin, the Sacklers, who extracted billions, faced no criminal charges; the 2025 bankruptcy settlement, $7.4 billion, set aside about $850 million — paid over fifteen years — for individual victims. The 2008 bank bailouts, $700 billion in TARP money, and not a single major Wall Street chief executive went to prison for the conduct that produced them. Contrast, if you will, Charles Keating and the Lincoln Savings collapse of the late 1980s: $3.4 billion to the taxpayers, about four and a half years served before the conviction was overturned on a technicality, and a guilty plea in 1999. In one era the powerful went to prison. In ours they retire to their compounds.
I won’t mention the wind farms pulled out of Sri Lanka, or the airport deal lost in Kenya, or the French oil major that paused new investment when the indictments landed. None of that is the case. The case is the twelve-gigawatt solar contract, sold twice — once to the officials who took the bribe, once to the investors who were not told about it — and now formally declined by the country the investors trusted to mind the store.
The judge can still refuse. The pattern is not waiting for him. The gavel never falls on the powerful; it only rests in the hand of the man who holds it. The case is closed. The system is working.