By – Prakarsh Kastwar
Congress criticizes the Modi administration over a recent report on the Adani Group’s’stock manipulation’ and seeks a parliamentary investigation.
The Narendra Modi-led Union government came under fire from the Congress party on Thursday after it was claimed in an investigative report that two Adani family business partners traded Adani Group stock for years at a time value of hundreds of millions of dollars. The communications director for the Congress, Jairam Ramesh, asserted that “despite the Modi government’s best efforts,” the truth would eventually come to light and reiterated the call for a parliamentary investigation.
Jairam Ramesh stated on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, “The stench of corruption around the network of Adani-linked shell companies located in opaque tax havens is only getting stronger with the money trail being established now.” “The truth will not remain hidden for ever, despite the best efforts of the Modi government.”
Ramesh claimed that the shocking information regarding the “clearly brazen violations of Indian securities laws” committed by the Adani Group and its close associates serves as a reminder of the “lengths and depths to which the PM has gone to protect his corrupt friends and their misdeeds by rendering India’s regulatory and investigative agencies toothless, reducing them to political tools to intimidate the Opposition rather than to investigate wrongdoing.”
After short-seller Hindenburg Research claimed in January that the corporation had participated in corporate fraud and stock price manipulation, investigative studies by The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, The Financial Times, and The Guardian dealt a fresh blow to the troubled conglomerate. All 10 of the listed Adani equities retreated in Thursday trading, along with the majority of the group’s dollar bonds, after potentially contentious owners of the company’s stock were revealed by the new probe.
Adani Group denies charges
However, Adani Group disregarded the reports and charged that they were part of a plot to artificially depress its stock price.
“We remain confident of the quality of our disclosures and corporate governance standards,” it stated. “We have complete faith in the due process of law.”
The timing of these news items seems suspicious, cunning, and malevolent in view of these facts.