Nate Anderson, founder of the now defunct Hindenburg Research, has denied any connection with Rahul Gandhi and dismissed as “fiction” a media report that said Gautam Adani worked with Israeli intelligence service agents and found that India’s leader of Opposition coordinated with the US short-selling firm to target the Indian billionaire.

“The article reads like lousy spy fiction and looks to be fabricated out of thin air,” Anderson wrote on X Friday in a long statement.

The report had claimed that Mossad carried out a covert operation – codenamed Operation Zeppelin – targeting the home servers of Sam Pitroda, head of the Indian Overseas Congress.

The article claimed that the Mossad-Adani operation “exposed encrypted chatrooms and undisclosed backchannels of communication,” and claimed of links between Rahul Gandhi and Hindenburg to undermine Adani and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The report also claimed that Israeli spies “found the involvement of activist lawyers, journalists, hedge funds and political figures”, many of whom were linked to the Biden administration, the US “Deep State” and George Soros, the hedge fund investor and philanthropist who is a hate figure for rightwingers.

In January 2023, Hindenburg published a report accusing the Adani Group of stock market manipulation and accounting fraud. The report led to a political furore with the Opposition accusing Modi for what it called his Adani connection.

The Adani Group denied all the allegations and insinuations.

The Hindenburg report was made public a week before Adani was in Israel to finalise a $1.2-billion deal to acquire the Haifa port.

The report that Anderson denied had claimed that Hindenburg’s men met with Rahul Gandhi in Palo Alto, California, in May 2023.

“I’ve never even been to Palo Alto, and no one on my team (nor I) nor any "allies" I'm aware of have met with or even spoken with any Indian politician, whether a member of the opposition or otherwise. Nor did we ever meet with or speak with any Biden officials, as also claimed by Sputnik,” Anderson wrote in his post on X.

“....the article claims Adani’s spies uncovered that we worked with “a complex web of activist lawyers, journalists, hedge funds, and political figures”. We didn’t, and the article doesn’t name a single one,” he wrote.

He denied that Adani’s legal firm had sent a seven-page legal brief to his office and that he retired because of that.

“This never happened. As far as I can tell, the supposed 7-page letter is just a total fabrication,” Anderson wrote. “The entire piece is an absurd James Bond fantasy, likely concocted by an Adani PR team.”

In November 2024, US prosecutors indicted Adani for his alleged role in a $265-million scheme to bribe Indian officials to bag power supply deals from energy projects in India. The Adani Group has denied any wrongdoing.

In January this year, Hindenburg shut down. Though Anderson gave no specific reason, he said he was looking forward to taking up hobbies, travelling and spending time with his fiancée and their child.