Early in January, Gautam Adani, an Indian businessman and associate of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, was the world’s second richest man. By the end of the month he had lost much of his fortune, after being accused by the US-based investment firm Hindenburg Research of pulling the ‘largest con in corporate history’. Facing allegations of fraud and a stock-market rout, he appeared in Haifa on 31 January, smiling for pictures with Benjamin Netanyahu, and hailing the Abraham Accords brokered by Jared Kushner as a ‘gamechanger’, as he took charge of Israel’s largest port. Adani’s ‘liberation’ of Haifa, as Netanyahu put it, brings closer the prospect of a rail link between Israel and its new friends in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Adani’s ‘strategic purchase’, for which he paid a staggering $1.2 billion, also limits Chinese influence in the region. And Adani had his own reasons to smile. Standing next to Netanyahu, who had just name-checked his ‘good friend’ Modi, he could show that he still had allies in high places.