Adani Abandons Legal Action Against Oz Activist; Had Surveiled Him & Family, Demanded $600 Million In "Damages"

[hatrack]

The Indian mining company Adani has agreed to end its marathon legal pursuit of the environmental activist Ben Pennings. Pennings declared victory on Thursday, after the Queensland supreme court signed off on orders on Wednesday, ending the five-and-a-half-year court battle. The order requires Pennings not to seek to acquire Adani’s confidential information or to ask others to do so, but the company has dropped a demand for payment of damages which at one stage stood at $600m.

The case began in 2020. Adani made an unsuccessful application to conduct an unannounced search of Pennings’s family home in June 2020, for possible evidence he had obtained its confidential information related to the Carmichael coalmine. Court documents in that case detailed that Adani hired a private investigator to surveil the activist and his family members, including taking photographs of him walking his then nine-year-old daughter to school.

Adani then lodged a civil claim against Pennings, the national spokesperson for the group Galilee Blockade, alleging he sought to disrupt the operations of the Carmichael coalmine, its suppliers and contractors. In 2023 Adani dropped the part of its claim that Pennings had unlawfully accessed secret information.

The long-time activist has repeatedly described the company’s legal action as a Slapp suit, a strategic lawsuit against public participation. At a press conference on Thursday, he said his was the biggest, longest and most expensive Slapp suit in the country’s history. He accused the company of making an example of him in order to scare other opponents of its project. “Corporate-run Slapp suits are just an affront to democracy, far as I’m concerned,” he said, calling on the government to move to ban them, as has happened in American states and Europe.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/27/adani-drops-legal-pursuit-environmental-activist-ben-pennings