Dollars over doctrine: The financialisation of criminal justice and the Adani affair

The endgame was as predictable as it was instructive. In mid-May 2026, the United States resolved, with assembly-line efficiency, every legal proceeding it had launched against the Adani empire. The Department of Justice permanently dropped all criminal fraud charges against Gautam Adani and his nephew Sagar Adani, charges arising from an alleged $265 million bribery scheme to secure solar energy contracts in India.

The Securities and Exchange Commission had already settled its civil suit: Gautam Adani paying $6 million, Sagar Adani paying $12 million, neither man admitting or denying anything. Simultaneously, Adani Enterprises agreed to pay $275 million to the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control to settle alleged Iran sanctions violations involving LPG imports routed through a Dubai trader.

Three agencies. Three settlements. Zero convictions. The accused, in the memorable American idiom, walked.

What made the resolution more striking than the charges themselves was its mechanism. The DoJ's published explanation - that it had "decided, in its prosecutorial discretion, not to devote further resources" to the case - was, at least in part, a euphemism. Adani's legal team of five American law firms including Sullivan & Cromwell and Nixon Peabody had mounted a forceful jurisdictional challenge, arguing that the case constituted an "impermissibly extraterritorial application" of US securities laws - Indian defendants, Indian issuers, securities not traded on US exchanges, conduct occurring entirely outside American soil.

But the challenge that appears to have proved most compelling was not legal. According to reports in the New York Times, Adani's representatives proposed to DoJ prosecutors in Washington that if charges were dropped, Adani would invest $10 billion in the American economy and create 15,000 jobs. Justice, in other words, was tendered a business proposition. The transaction was consummated. Crime, duly financialised, was extinguished.

Under a Trump administration that has made no secret of its preference for deal-making over process, the merger of prosecutorial discretion with economic negotiation is not merely predictable. It is, by the administration's own lights, rational governance. The circularity is striking: the President's personal counsel, Robert Giuffra Jr, led the defence team before the President's own Justice Department. Due process, formally observed; substantive accountability, quietly dissolved.

This is not aberration. It is American capitalism operating precisely as designed. The 2008 global financial crisis furnished the paradigm. The sub-prime mortgage scandal - in which Wall Street institutions manufactured, packaged and sold instruments of catastrophic risk while millions of ordinary Americans lost their homes and savings - was the largest peacetime financial fraud in recorded history. Barack Obama vowed accountability. What followed was a masterclass in the art of penalty without punishment. JPMorgan Chase paid $13 billion. Goldman Sachs paid $5 billion. Bank of America paid $16.6 billion. Not a single senior Wall Street executive was criminally convicted. The prosecutorial energy of the mightiest legal system on earth was channelled into negotiated settlements - deferred prosecution agreements, consent decrees, civil penalties - instruments calibrated to extract money without incarcerating persons. The State performed justice. Capital purchased impunity.

Jesse Eisinger's The Chickenshit Club anatomised the DoJ's institutional reluctance to prosecute large corporations, tracing it to risk-aversion, revolving-door relationships between regulators and the regulated and the doctrine - never formally acknowledged but pervasively operative - that certain entities are simply too big to jail. The phrase echoes the more famous formulation that justified the bailouts: too big to fail. In the American financial system, size is not merely an economic fact; it is a constitutional shield.

The Adani resolution refines this template for the geopolitical moment and adds a new dimension: the investment pledge as prosecutorial currency. The offer to inject $10 billion and generate 15,000 American jobs translates the logic of financialised justice into the language of transactional diplomacy. It is, at bottom, a tariff on impunity. One that has evidently found a willing collector in Washington.

What emerges, viewed across the sweep of these cases, is a coherent (if deeply troubling) system. American criminal justice, when applied to capital and its representatives, is not punishment-oriented but settlement-oriented. The penalty is the price of doing business; the indictment is the opening bid in a negotiation. The rule of law is honoured formally - charges are filed, proceedings are commenced, courts are invoked - while its substantive core, that criminal guilt should attract criminal consequence regardless of wealth, is quietly dissolved.

Ordinary defendants - those without billion-dollar balance sheets, presidential lawyers, or investment offers - navigate an entirely different system: mandatory minimums, prosecutorial pressure, plea bargains extracted under threat of crushing sentences. The divergence is not incidental. It is structural. In the land of the free, freedom has always carried a price tag. For those who can afford it, that price is a settlement. For those who cannot, it is a sentence.

The Adani affair, then, is not an anomaly. It is a data point confirming the theorem. In the capitalist universe, crime, like everything else, is a commodity. Priced correctly - $293 million to the SEC and Treasury, plus a $10 billion investment pledge to the DoJ's unspoken ledger - it clears the market. The State collects its fee and moves on. Whether this constitutes the rule of law or its most sophisticated subversion is, perhaps, the defining jurisprudential question of our age.

Let it be proudly proclaimed: this is Capitalism with a capital C in the land of the Free!

Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan is a practising Advocate at the Madras High Court.