repayments happening within the larger group. One way of looking at this is that it's a rebuff to the claims made by Hindenburg in its short selling report. A second is that no one's ever really been doubting that there's cash within the group, it's how much and where that has been the issue. A third, and more cynical view, is that we've already been told that this has happened anyway, haven't we?
The issue here today is that Adani Ports has called some bonds to repay them. This against a background of the wider Adani Group being pressured over its total debt burden - often by foreign creditors. So, one method of reading this is that those claims in the Hindenburg short selling report aren't wholly and exactly true. If debt's being repaid then it cannot be true that the series of companies is overburdened with debt, can it?
Adani Enterprises share price from Google
That's a possibly slightly naive reading of the issue. For all are agreed, right from the start, that Adani Ports throws off cash. It is Ports that is repaying these bonds too. So we're all agreed that could happen. Instead, the concern was about interlocking shareholdings financed by outside debt. And that's not the debt which is being repaid here.
We can even be one stage more cynical again. Which is that Adani as a group said that all of those interlocking loans and shareholdings had been paid off - or at least the margin loans secured against the stocks had been. As The Ken reported this might not have been wholly so. But here we are being told that the loans are being paid off again. Oh might be a useful response at this point.
The actual truth here being that paying off some of the group bonds isn't enough. We need to see clarity that there is finance to pay everything. Whether that's cash within the group, or the ability to refinance from outside it doesn't matter - but visibility is the necessary thing.
