Activist short-seller Nathan Anderson, known for his high-profile campaigns against the likes of Adani Group, said he is closing his firm, Hindenburg Research, not because of any threat — legal or otherwise — and that he stands by all its reports.

Mr. Anderson told PTI that Hindenburg’s January 2023 report accusing Adani Group of “the largest con in corporate history” was a result of following “red flags” raised against the conglomerate in media reports.

Adani group had repeatedly denied all allegations in the report.

He termed as “goofy conspiracy” the attempts by some to link Hindenburg with alleged anti-India groups like OCCRP and George Soros, saying his outlet never commented on them as it followed the policy of not feeding into “silly conspiracy theories”.

Mr. Anderson, who came to be known for meticulously detailed reports against companies he alleged were committing fraud, last month announced shutting down his forensic research firm nearly eight years after he founded it.

Also read: Hindenburg Research | With an eye for fraud

Asked why he chose to shut down Hindenburg when he could have stepped back and passed on the reins of the company to someone else, he said there is “no way to separate me from the brand”. “Hindenburg is basically synonymous with me,” he said. “If it was a software application or a bicycle factory you can sell the application or the factory. But when it’s research driven by me, you can’t really just hand that off, and so I would not actually be ‘done’. But I am happy to support the team if they want to launch a new brand, which I expect they will.” Mr. Anderson, who first shot to fame with a report against electric truck company Nikola and had gone after the companies of major financial figures, including Carl Icahn’s Icahn Enterprises LP, had last month blamed the “intensity and focus” of the job for the decision to wind up.

He had spent much of the last eight years either in fights or preparing for the next fight. Many times during this period, he was often trailed and attempts were made to infiltrate his system.

“As to why I retired — it is all in the letter [released on January 16 that announced shutting down of Hindenburg] — it is not based on any threat, health issue, personal issue or otherwise,” he said.

Conspiracies theories like being on the verge of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and/or U.S. SEC to “concoct a counter-narrative about my retirement is a great example of why I am happy to instead be enjoying more time with family, friends and good music”, he said.

Hindenburg has said it is not under investigation by the U.S. SEC over anonymous reports linking its founder to a hedge fund for preparing reports targeting companies.

Asked if he stood by Hindenburg reports particularly against the Adani group, Mr. Anderson said, “We 100% stand by all of our research findings.” Hindenburg had alleged that Adani Group had used a web of companies in tax havens to inflate its revenue and manipulate stock prices, even as debt piled up. The conglomerate vehemently denied all claims but the damning report at one point sheared over $150 billion off its value, losses it eventually recouped in over a year’s time.

The issue was agitated before the Supreme Court which did not find any need for a probe other than the one market regulator SEBI had initiated into certain issues prior to the Hindenburg report.

Also read: Allegations and scandals against the Adani Group: A timeline

On some seeing the Hindenburg report as against India and its growth story, Mr. Anderson said, “We have always believed in India’s potential and view market transparency and strong corporate governance as key factors that can fuel India’s growth story.” He did not elaborate.

“We initially saw media articles outlining red flags, took a closer look, and just kept following the evidence,” he said on why Adani group was chosen.

On allegations of being in cohorts with OCCRP and George Soros, he said, “Of course not, but we have a policy of not feeding into silly conspiracy theories. When the main response to 100+ pages of evidence [presented in the report against Adani Group] is a goofy conspiracy, we view it as a sign that we were right on the mark.” Asked about the response of regulatory bodies in India to Hindenburg reports, he said, “We view our role as researching and writing about issues in need of transparency. The rest is out of our hands.”

He dismissed allegations of sharing reports with hedge funds, saying, “We have always maintained full editorial control over all of our research.” “As we and many other U.S.-based short sellers have discussed in public interviews for years, our model involves investing our own capital and sometimes also bringing on a balance sheet partner. This is one of the most common business models in our industry, it is fully compliant with all applicable laws, and we disclose this in our reports,” he added.

The 40-something son of a university professor and a nurse, Nathan (Nate) Anderson on January 15 issued a personal note that Hindenburg Research was being wound up after it “finished the pipeline of ideas we were working on”. The Connecticut man, who worked for 10 months as an ambulance driver in Israel, studied international business, finance, and accounting, managed money for the rich, believed he could make money by exposing corporate corruption.

Hindenburg, founded in 2017, placed bets against the companies it was researching. And it made money when stock prices of its targets tumbled on disclosure of fraud and other abuses that it unearthed through deep forensic financial research.

It, however, made surprisingly little money — just over $4 million — from the report on billionaire Gautam Adani’s sprawling business empire in January 2023.

That figure, disclosed for the first time by Hindenburg on its website last year, along with details of a letter it said it had received from India’s markets regulator, SEBI.

Mr. Anderson appears to be wanting to move on, having achieved what he and his colleagues wanted. “We shook some empires that we felt needed shaking,” he wrote in a personal memo last month.

But, this did take a toll on him. “It has come at the cost of missing a lot of the rest of the world and the people I care about,” he had written. “It wasn’t always obvious to me, but I now view all of this as a love story.” Hindenburg’s research has led to fraud charges and indictments against dozens of individuals, but has also resulted in expensive legal battles. The firm had just 11 employees.

Its last published report was on online car retailer Carvana earlier this year.

New Delhi:

Lawyer Jai Anant Dehadrai launched an attack on Hindenburg Research chief Nate Anderson after reports said the US short seller is under scrutiny for securities fraud.

In documents filed at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in a defamation suit, the head of Canada’s Anson hedge fund, Moez Kassam, said his firm shared research “with a wide variety of sources” including Nate Anderson.

The Market Frauds portal said court documents allegedly showed Hindenburg colluded with Anson while preparing a report.

While short sellers borrow a security, sell it on the open market, and expect to repurchase it for less money after their damning report against the company brings stock down, involvement of hedge funds raises eyebrows as they could also place parallel bets, putting more downward pressure on stock prices.

Reacting to the development, Mr Dehadrai, a noted white-collar criminal law practitioner, said in a post on X, “Big News. Nate Anderson, founder of Hindenburg Research, is now under scrutiny for securities fraud for sharing non-public information with hedge funds before releasing his firm’s reports. Court documents from Canada suggest that Anderson conspired with Canada’s Anson Funds, providing them with early drafts of Hindenburg’s reports.”

“This practice absolutely amounts to market manipulation and insider trading, as it would have allowed hedge funds to profit from anticipated stock movements triggered by Hindenburg’s reports. Shocking revelations in emails between Anderson and Anson Funds . Question is, who profited from their fake report on Adani Stock in India?” the lawyer said.

Big News.

Nate Anderson, founder of Hindenburg Research, is now under scrutiny for securities fraud for sharing non-public information with hedge funds before releasing his firm’s reports.

Court documents from Canada suggest that Anderson conspired with Canada’s Anson Funds,… pic.twitter.com/XkMhMc3cyc

— Jai Anant Dehadrai (@jai_a_dehadrai) January 19, 2025

Mr Anderson – days before Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration – announced he would shut down Hindenburg. This led to speculation especially in India that he wanted to avoid a possible India and US investigation into Hindenburg, whose report targeted the Adani Group and led to huge losses for investors.

The Adani Group refuted all the allegations by Hindenburg, and eventually the group firms recovered and reached new heights in the markets, proving they have the trust of investors.

In the latest development linked to Mr Anderson, if it can be proven that the bearish reports were prepared without disclosure of participation, it can be charged as securities fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“We know for a fact, from the email conversations between Anderson and Anson Funds, that he was indeed working for Anson and published whatever they told him to, from the price target to what should and shouldn’t be in the report. He asked them multiple times if they needed ‘more’. From what we can see in the dozens of exchanges, at no time did he have editorial control. He was being told what to publish,” the Market Frauds portal reported.

It also shared screenshots of some email interactions – which it claims to have accessed through the documents available with the Ontario court – between Hindenburg and Anson to support its charge.

Mr Dehadrai also shared the same screenshot.

In 2020, Hindenburg Research published a report on Facedrive, a Canadian company that went public through a reverse merger as an eco-friendly ride-sharing service, chiding it for being over valued and lavishly paying promoters.

Anson allegedly exchanged emails with Mr Anderson over the report and court documents reveal the hedge fund had knowledge of when the report was to be published.

The filings follow a separate years-long investigation by the US Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In June, Anson Funds Management and Anson Advisors Inc, without admitting or denying any wrongdoing, agreed to pay $2.25 million to settle SEC claims that they failed to tell clients about payments to outside publishers of bearish research.

With inputs from PTI

(Disclaimer: New Delhi Television is a subsidiary of AMG Media Networks Limited, an Adani Group Company.)

New Delhi:

Senior lawyer Mahesh Jethmalani has punctured US short seller Hindenburg Research’s chief Nate Anderson over his announcement that he would wind up the firm. Mr Anderson said the work took a toll on him as it was “rather intense and at times all-encompassing”.

Hindenburg targeted the Adani Group in a case that is now seen as an attack on the ‘India Story’.

“Frankly speaking, I don’t know how old Mr Anderson is, but the fact of the matter is that he’s not had some sterling results. His claim to fame really rests on the Adani hit job, which he was part of. I don’t think he’s done other serious work or businesses of note. So, he is essentially a research analyst,” Mr Jethmalani told NDTV.

One of the reasons for winding up Hindenburg, Mr Anderson said, was it completed the projects it was handling. The announcement comes just days before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration event. There is speculation Hindenburg is disbanding to avoid a possible India-US joint investigation.

“I really don’t know his exact line of business. He is a research analyst who provides reports to people, or he is hired by people who need to bear-hammer a few shares for profiteering. In this case, of course, he became a little larger than life because he took on one of the biggest industries in India, which for a couple of days caused serious economic turbulence in the country,” Mr Jethmalani said.

Mr Anderson’s allegations led to panic among investors and wiped out more than $150 billion in the value of the Adani Group shares at their lowest point. A lot of that was money from small-time investors, men and women who put in their hard-earned savings. And now Mr Anderson says ‘I am off, I am done.’

How does one ensure accountability?

“As far as India is concerned, SEBI is on the job. The problem is that this man doesn’t live in India. He is presumably a US national. Now, if he is a US national, all the best we can do is seek the cooperation of the government. But the last government, the ‘Democratic deep state’ as we call it, were hand in glove with this man through the [George] Soros connection,” Mr Jethmalani told NDTV, referring to an investigation by the capital markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).

“Soros is the biggest financial contributor to the coffers of the Democratic party and has an overwhelming say in their policies, particularly the economic policies. Now, Soros is known for his anti-India and particularly anti-PM Modi government stand. So, there is not much you can do except now hope that – and I suspect – that the Trump administration may already have started some kind of a probe which led to this man winding up his company,” the senior lawyer said.

“Having said that, whatever aid we can get from the Trump administration, which will be a lot more friendlier to the Indian government on this issue as well, we should undoubtedly invoke that help, and see that this man is brought to justice along with all the others whom he connived with,” Mr Jethmalani added.

Earlier today, another senior lawyer, Mukul Rohatgi, described Hindenburg as a “dubious organisation”. Mr Rohatgi, who is also the former Attorney General for India, told NDTV Hindenburg had been constantly attacking the Indian economy and a company, shaking the confidence of the Indian markets and “affecting the investments of millions of people.”

“Look, I don’t think anybody could accept or, you know, find out anything more about a dubious organisation, an organisation which says that they are short sellers. They say that they are out to create havoc in share markets… And I think they have realised that it is a shoot and scoot policy,” Mr Rohatgi told NDTV.

“And therefore, they want to just close down because they don’t want to face any investigation, either in India or the US or any other jurisdiction. And maybe they fear that when President Trump takes over, he may look into the complaints filed by Indian bodies and industrial houses or Indian government entities,” the senior lawyer said. “Therefore, the idea is to shut shop and run away.”

He said Hindenburg will have to face investigation somehow.

“The people who are behind this dubious organisation, they will certainly be liable and they can certainly be tracked down wherever they are. And they must face the heat and face the action,” Mr Rohatgi said.

The matter had turned political with the Congress and other Opposition parties seeking a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) probe into the Hindenburg report, despite India’s institutions and the Supreme Court completely dismissing Hindenburg’s “findings”.

Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani at the annual general meeting in June said the group “faced baseless accusations made by a foreign short seller that questioned our decades of hard work.”

“In the face of an unprecedented attack on our integrity and reputation, we fought back and proved that no challenge could weaken the foundations on which your Group has been established,” he said.

Hindenburg Research, the US-based short seller that had targeted several business entities including the Adani Group, is going to be disbanded, founder Nate Anderson has said.

“I have made the decision to disband Hindenburg Research. The plan has been to wind up after we finished the pipeline of ideas we were working on,” he said in a note on the Hindenburg website.

In an announcement that comes days before Donald Trump takes office, Anderson has also clarified there has been no particular threat or personal issue behind this decision to wind up.

Hindenburg targeted the Adani Group in 2022 with what the group said was “nothing but a lie” and were “calculated attacks on India”. The Supreme Court, too, had given a clean chit to the Adani Group with analysts and experts calling out the 

In August 2024, the short-seller launched another attack on the energy-to ports conglomerate, which snubbed the charges as “recycled claims” that had earlier been discarded.

Speaking about the short seller hit jobs a month later, Gautam Adani, the chairman of Adani Group, had said it taught him the “most profound lesson”.

“Our leadership spirit was never more visible than during the financial market attack in January last year. It was a short-selling attack initiated from abroad. This was not a typical financial strike. It was a dual assault targeting our financial stability and pulling us into a political storm. It was a calculated move,” he had said.

The short seller had also targeted Indian markets regulator chief Madhavi Puri Buch and her husband in the past, who had called it an “attempt at character assassination”.

(Disclaimer: New Delhi Television is a subsidiary of AMG Media Networks Limited, an Adani Group Company.)