Trinamool MP Mahua Moitra asked Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman for answers about the state-run Life Insurance Corporation’s exposure to the troubled Adani Group. She pointed to a news report that said the value of its holdings in Adani companies had, for the first time, dropped below the purchase price by nearly 11% to settle at less than 27,000 crore.
“So far, LIC India has lost 3,200 crore in Adani shares, and Nirmala Sitharaman… what kind of pressure is there to help Adani even if it hurts the Indian people? We need answers, “Friday morning, she sent a tweet.
The attached screenshot was from a news story that said, “For the first time, the market value of the state-owned Life Insurance Corporation’s (LIC) shares in Adani Group’s five big companies has dropped below what they were bought for.” The report named the five companies in question as Adani Enterprise, Adani Green Energy, Adani Transmission, Adani Ports, and Total Adani Gas.
Since the US-based short-seller Hindenburg Research’s report alleging “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud,” there has been a lot of attention on Gautam Adani’s group of companies.
The report caused a huge political storm in India and cost the Adani Group billions of dollars. This week, the value of its 10 companies on the stock market fell below $100 billion, and Adani fell from being the second richest person in the world to being the 29th.
The Adani Group has denied doing anything wrong. It has also hired legal and PR firms and paid back some of its huge debts to try to calm investors and markets.
In the last few weeks, most of the opposition’s attacks on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have been about the Adani dispute. Congress MP Rahul Gandhi and Mahua Moitra have been at the forefront of these attacks.
Parts of Gandhi’s speech to Parliament were taken out because he said the ruling BJP has ties to Adani, who is from Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The opposition has asked for a joint parliamentary investigation into its claims that both the LIC and the State Bank of India have too much money invested in the Adani Group. The case has gone all the way up to the Supreme Court, which has asked the government to put together a group to look at and improve the way regulations are made.
At the beginning of this month, both Nirmala Sitharaman and the head of the Reserve Bank, Shaktikanta Das, eased fears about how the Adani crisis would affect the Indian economy. Das said that the banking sector was “strong and resilient,” and Sitharaman said that any risk was “well within the allowed limits.”
Also on Friday, the Supreme Court said no to a request to stop the news from talking about the Adani-Hindenburg case until it makes a decision. The chief justice, DY Chandrachud, said, “We are never going to put a stop to the media.” This happened after the court said no to the government’s request to send the expert panel’s suggestions in a sealed envelope.
