'Mobile phone banking by Modi Govt': Congress on LIC investment in Adani group

NEW DELHI: Congress on Saturday claimed that the LIC investment of around Rs 33,000 crore in the Adani Group was “mobile phone banking” by the Modi government under pressure to help a company facing funding troubles owing to serious allegations of criminality.

Demanding a probe by Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC) into how LIC was “literally forced” to make the investments as a “first step”, it claimed that internal documents showed that officials pushed through the proposal in May 2025 and the reported goals were to “signal confidence” in the conglomerate and to "encourage participation from other investors".

Seeking answers from the government on the latest move as well as SBI's 2023 decision to invest Rs 525 crore in Adani FPO despite a drop in the latter’s shares, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge alleged that the “real beneficiaries” of Direct Benefits Transfer are not the common people but rather Prime Minister Narendra Modi's “close friends”.

“Does a common salaried middle-class person, who saves every penny to pay the LIC premium, even know that Modi is using his hard-earned savings to bail out Adani? Isn’t this a breach of trust? Isn’t this looting? Busy filling the pockets of his ‘close friend’, why is Modi squandering the hard-earned money of 30 crore LIC policyholders?” Kharge posted on ‘X’ referring to a report.

In a statement, Congress General Secretary (Communications) Jairam Ramesh said, “the question arises: under whose pressure did the officials of the Ministry of Finance and NITI Aayog decide that their job was to bail out a private company facing funding difficulties due to serious allegations of criminality? Is this not a textbook case of 'mobile phone banking'?”

He said the “costs of throwing public money at crony firms became clear” when LIC earlier suffered a Rs 7,850 crore loss in four hours of trading on 21 September, 2024, following the indictment of Gautam Adani and his seven associates in the United States in connection with an alleged Rs 2,000 crore bribery scheme to secure high-priced solar power contracts in India.

The Modi government has refused, for nearly a year, to serve a US SEC summons to the Prime Minister’s most favoured business conglomerate, he alleged while adding that the Modi government and Adani Group has “systematically misused” the LIC and the savings of its 30 crore policyholders.

“The entirety of this ‘Modani Mega Scam’ can only be investigated by a Joint Parliamentary Committee that the Congress has been demanding for almost three years...As a first step, now at least the PAC should fully investigate how LIC was literally forced to make investments in the Adani Group. That will be well within its powers,” Ramesh said.

Ramesh claimed that the “Modani MegaScam is very wide-ranging” and it “encompasses” the misuse of central agencies to force private companies to sell their assets to Adani Group, “rigged privatisation of critical infrastructure assets” like airports and ports and misuse of diplomatic resources to funnel contracts to the Adani Group in countries, especially in the neighbourhood.

He also alleged that this scam encompasses the import of “over-invoiced coal by close Adani associates Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli and Chang Chung-Ling” using a money-laundering network of shell companies, which contributed to sharp increases in the prices of electricity drawn from Adani power stations in Gujarat.

Ramesh also referred to the pre-election electricity supply agreements at abnormally high prices in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra and the recent allocation of land at Rs 1 per acre for a power plant in poll-bound Bihar.