Adani Group to pre-pay $500-million loan due on March 9: Report

Adani Group is planning to prepay a $500 million loan due next month to a group of foreign banks including Barclays Plc and Standard Chartered, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. Barclays Plc, Standard Chartered Plc, and Deutsche Bank AG are among the banks that lent the group $4.5 billion to finance the purchase of Holcim cement assets last year, the report said. A portion of that loan is due on March 9.

Financial Times reported that the Adani Group faced a margin call of more than $500 million on a $1.1 billion share-backed loan, prompting the conglomerate to repay the whole debt, according to Reuters.  

Adani Group has been rocked by a damaging report by US-based short seller Hindenburg Research, which accused the group of fraud and stock manipulation and said that it was highly leveraged. The trust of investors was shaken by these charges following which the stocks of group companies crashed before making some recovery in the past two days.

To boost the confidence of the investors, Adani has started pre-paying some of the loans whose due dates are still away. Earlier on Tuesday, Adani Ports said it expected to repay loans, including bonds, worth Rs 5,000 crore next financial year. Adani Ports CEO Karan Adani said the company was targeting FY24 EBITDA of Rs 14,500 crore-15,000 crore.

Besides an estimated capital expenditure of Rs 4,000 crore-Rs 4,500 crore, he said the company was considering total loan repayment and prepayment of around Rs 5,000 crore, which he said will significantly improve the firm's net debt to EBITDA ratio and bring it closer to 2.5x by March 24.

Adani Group promoters on Monday posted the amounts to prepay $1.1 billion of the share-backed facility of its maturity of September 2024. In a statement, the company's spokesperson said that in light of recent market volatility and in continuation of the promoters’ commitment to reducing the overall leverage backed by Adani Listed Company shares, "we are pleased to inform that promoters have posted the amounts to prepay $1,114 million ahead of its maturity of Sep 2024."

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