New Delhi: A Financial Times report published Tuesday (February 17, 2026) says Italy’s biggest bank investigated two associates of Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani’s brother, Vinod Adani, soon after United States short seller Hindenburg Research’s report in January 2023. The bank was prompted to investigate clients with associations with the Adani Group after Hindenburg alleged stock price manipulation and insider trading, among other alleged wrongdoings, at the conglomerate.The bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, met both associates of Vinod Adani after its probe, and they signed a statement rejecting the allegations in the Hindenburg report. However, Intesa still reported suspicious activity against the two and restricted their accounts, FT reports.Both Chang Chung-Ling, a Taiwanese businessman, and Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli from the United Arab Emirates held USD 1 billion and USD 2 billion, respectively, in hedge funds with underlying assets “likely” invested in Adani companies, FT reports. The report cites an internal memo of Intesa Sanpaolo, which found these holdings existed on the day after the Hindenburg report was released.The Indian stock regulator is investigating Hindenburg Research, which has since disbanded. The Securities and Exchange Board of India cleared the Adani Group of fraud allegations made in the Hindenburg report.FT says the Intesa memo and other documents were shared with it by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a network of investigative journalists. FT and OCCRP have reported previously on the Adani Group.“Adani Group, which is India’s biggest private thermal power company, biggest private port operator, biggest private airport operator and biggest private coal importer, strongly denies any wrongdoing,” FT reports.The Intesa memo, according to the story, followed a probe after “staff discovered that the Dubai branch of the Swiss private bank it took over in 2020, Reyl and Cie, had three clients courtesy the same ‘business introducer’: Vinod Adani, Chang and Ahli.”Chang is also under investigation in Switzerland on suspicion of being an Adani “frontman”.According to the memo, Chang and Ahli confirmed to senior Intesa officials that they controlled the accounts involved in the hedge fund transactions. They said their wealth derived from professional activity and their investments in Adani companies were “based on their trust in the business acumen of the members of that family”.The article mentions why the Chang and Ahli transactions matter: they support the Hindenburg claim that associates secretly held Adani stock, potentially breaching rules to prevent insiders from manipulating prices.The memo reportedly says Chang’s account interacted directly with Vinod Adani’s, though for “not particularly significant” amounts. Earlier FT-OCCRP reports say Chang and Ahli used offshore funds, allegedly helped by a Vinod Adani employee, to buy and trade Adani shares while obscuring who really controlled them.“Intesa’s description of them [Chang and Ahli] as holding ‘a very significant amount of shares in the same hedge funds’ suggests a similar structure to that previously reported. The initials of the British Virgin Islands holding companies they used to control those investments also match those of companies they used previously”, the FT report says.