Veteran emerging-markets investor Mark Mobius said his firm didn’t participate in Adani Enterprises Ltd’s stock sale before it was pulled due to concerns about the debt of the Indian tycoon’s firms.
“We were not interested in Adani companies because they did not meet our investment criteria, particularly as regards to debt,” Mobius said by email in response to Bloomberg’s questions on Thursday. The $2.4 billion share sale, which was first announced on January 18, was abruptly pulled on Wednesday as the fallout from a short-seller report by Hindenburg Research continued to spiral.
Mobius Capital Partners LLP’s $41.5 million emerging markets fund counts India as one of its top allocations.
Shares in Gautam Adani’s businesses have lost $108 billion in a week, one of the biggest wipeouts in India’s history, after Hindenburg accused the Adani group of market manipulation and accounting fraud — allegations the conglomerate has repeatedly denied. Dollar bonds issued by entities in the Adani group have also plunged to distressed levels.
The selloff deepened after Bloomberg reported this week that Credit Suisse Group AG stopped accepting bonds of Adani’s group of companies as collateral for margin loans to its private banking clients.
Mobius, who spent more than three decades at Franklin Templeton Investments before founding his own firm in 2018, told Bloomberg last week that he plans to put more money into India as the “long-term future of the market is great.”
