Should probe Hindenburg’s claims but short seller is not credible: Annamalai
Tamil Nadu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president K Annamalai said that he would support an investigation into US-based short seller Hindenburg Research’s allegations against Madhabi Puri Buch, Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) Chairperson, and her husband Dhaval Buch. However, he also took a dig at Hindenburg saying that it was not a public service company but was a for-profit organisation, and its aim was to target the Adani Group.
Speaking to journalists on Sunday, August 11, Annamalai said, “We should not see whether Hindenburg is good or bad. Like thousands of others, they are also saying that the SEBI chief had wealth in offshore accounts. That should be investigated, but we know that Hindenburg has raised similar allegations against Adani, Ambani in the past and nothing was proven. Hindenburg is targeting Adani as it is easier to take a short position in the group but not in stable companies such as Hindustan Unilever. Even if they are lying now, a responsible government should investigate.”
In an expose on August 10, Hindenburg Research said that whistleblower documents show that Madhabi and Dhaval Buch had stakes in “a multi-layered offshore fund structure with miniscule assets, traversing known high-risk jurisdictions, overseen by a company with reported ties to the Wirecard scandal, in the same entity run by an Adani director and significantly used by Vinod Adani in the alleged Adani cash syphoning scandal.”
In a statement, Madhabi Buch and her husband said that the allegations are devoid of any truth and that their lives and finances were an open book. “All disclosures as required have already been furnished to SEBI over the years. We have no hesitation in disclosing any and all financial documents, including those that relate to the period when we were strictly private citizens, to any and every authority that may seek them,” it read. Adani Group also released a statement refuting the allegations. “We completely reject these allegations against the Adani Group which are a recycling of discredited claims that have been thoroughly investigated, proven to be baseless and already dismissed by the Supreme Court in January 2024,” the statement read.
In February 2023, 34-year-old law student Anamika Jaiswal filed a batch of petitions before the Supreme Court seeking a CBI and SIT probe into transactions of the Adani Group and had flagged a possible conflict of interest with a close relative of Adani being on SEBI’s Committee on Corporate Governance. The petition mentions that out of the 24 investigations SEBI was conducting, five were related to insider trading, and the presence of a close relative of Adani on the committee was a clear conflict of interest. In addition to conflict of interest, the petitioner accused SEBI of suppressing previous investigations into the Adani Group and, therefore, committing perjury.
