FinCEN leak shows New York bank flagged transfers to Adani from Seychelles: Report

A New York-based bank, Bank of New York Mellon (BNYM), had flagged transfers to Adani Global PTE, the global wing of Adani Group, from alleged shell companies in tax-haven Seychelles in its Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) filed to the US financial watchdog FinCEN, according to a report by The Indian Express.

This development comes on the heels of FinCEN reports which listed several global banks who processed large payments linked to alleged illicit funds.

Also Read: Global banks like HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Standard Chartered moved illicit funds, FinCen documents show

According to the SARs, several “suspicious” transactions were recorded between the company and “shell-like” entities in Seychelles during 2005 to 2014 time period. The very next year, BNYM filed another SAR listing 1,241 fresh transactions worth $105 million in January alone.

One of the “shell-like” companies that SARs flagged is an investment company called Thionville Financer Ltd with addresses in Mahe and Victoria, Seychelles.

Also Read: US policymakers seize on FinCEN leaks to press for stepped up money-laundering fight

Apart from the suspicious nature of the company, the SARs also pointed out that the high-amount transactions were carried out in round-dollar amounts (rounded off to 50,000 or 100,000).

Replying to the suspicious transactions, Adani Group told The Indian Express that the transactions were completely legitimate and “have been disclosed to the authorities in the respective jurisdiction.”

Also read — FinCEN documents connect money laundering network in Pakistan to Dawood Ibrahim's financier: Report

Hitting out at the multi-national company, Subramanian Swamy, Rajya Sabha MP, tweeted, “When I tweeted two years ago that Adani was a "trapeze artist" in finance, there was a howl from BJP IT's fake ID specialists. Today Indian Express has published a US investigation in Seychelles that Adani has been engaged in “suspicious” financial “laundering" & “sanitisation”.

He was referring to his comment made in 2018 when he called Guatam Adani the “biggest NPA trapeze artists in PSUs.”