From Our Bureau
NEW DELHI: What a contrast on Adani issue, says Congress general secretary (communication) Jairam Ramesh.
“PM Modi comfortably opts for silence on the accusations made against him in relation to the Adani stock rout. The Opposition, on the other hand, gets notice for raising the issue in Parliament,” Jairam tweeted.
In his eighth list of three questions, he focused on the repeated findings of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) that the Adani Group has been guilty of stock manipulation that surprisingly seems not to have led to any urgency by the Indian regulators to investigate the suspicious jump in the Adani stock prices over the past three years.
Here are three questions:
1. A 2007 SEBI ruling following an investigation into excessive volatility in the shares of Adani Exports (now known as Adani Enterprises) between 1999 and 2001 had found that the entities associated with notorious stock manipulator Ketan Parekh (KP) had indulged in “manipulative activities such as synchronised trading/circular trading and creation of artificial volume to influence the price in the scrip of Adani.” This bears a disturbing resemblance of the current allegations against Adani Group, the difference being that the tock manipulation is now being done by opaque offshore entities. Why did SEBI tolerate an even more extreme rise in Adani Group stock prices after 2020, without investigating it with the required seriousness?
2. Recent revelations indicated that the convicted stockbroker Ketan Parek may still maintain links with the Adani Group. A close relative of his ha worked with Elara Capital, the firm whose India fund had 99% invested in Adani stocks. Elara also is known to have had a relatipnship with the chartered accountant Dharmesh Doshi, a Parek associate who absconded from India in 2002. Given the serious allegations that Elara is a front for the Adani Group, is the government turning a blind eye to fresh collusion between Parek and the Adani group, a relationship that goes back almost 25 years?
3. Both Congress and BJP government have in the past agreed to set up a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) to investigate large-scale cases of stock market manipulations. In 1992, a JPC was set up to look into the Harshad Mehta case while in 2001, a JPC investigated the Ketan Parek case. Both PM Narasimha Rao and PM Atal Behari Vajpayee had the confidence and trust in the elected representatives to investigate scams that affected crores of Indian investors. What are you afraid of? Do you fear that a truly independent investigation might implicate you personally in the Adani Group’s wrongdoings?
