What is the story about?
Adani Enterprises Limited (AEL) has agreed to pay $275 million to settle potential civil liability tied to alleged violations of US sanctions on Iran,
the US Department of Treasury said on Monday. According to the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the company imported liquefied petroleum gas shipments that were presented as originating from Oman and Iraq, but were in fact sourced from Iran through a Dubai-based trader.
US Treasury determined the following to be mitigating factors:
- AEL has not received a penalty notice or Finding of Violation from OFAC in the five years preceding the earliest date of the transactions giving rise to the Apparent Violations.
- At the time of the shipments, AEL’s nascent LPG business was a small percentage of AEL’s overall revenue, representing less than 1.5% of AEL’s consolidated revenue for 2025.
- AEL provided substantial cooperation to OFAC, including by conducting a thorough, independent internal investigation on an expedited basis and at substantial cost, responding promptly to OFAC’s requests for information, and providing large volumes of data regarding the Apparent Violations.
- AEL has implemented significant remedial measures to respond to the Apparent Violations, including ceasing imports of LPG into India, enhancing its sanctions compliance policy and controls, and implementing certain compliance commitments.
AEL has already begun implementing some of these commitments, including the following:
- Creating and adopting a robust risk-based U.S. sanctions compliance policy and written due diligence protocol overseen by a dedicated Group Head of Compliance
- Applying the enhanced sanctions compliance policy across AEL, in order to foster consistency, comprehensiveness, and uniformity in how sanctions-related diligence is conducted across its business units
- Incorporating into its sanctions risk assessment consideration of risks relating to maritime transport of hydrocarbons, including risks identified in OFAC’s published guidance
- Deploying information technology solutions for maritime intelligence specifically designed to mitigate risks in the marine transportation sector.
The Justice Department is also close to dropping related criminal fraud charges against Adani, who has promised to invest $10 billion in the US economy, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
(With agency inputs)
