Supreme Court to hear plea for probe into Adani report on Feb 10

The Supreme Court is to take up on Friday a plea for a direction to the Centre and SEBI to inquire into the alleged “criminal conspiracy” behind the Hindenburg report into the Adani group of companies, leading to crashing of the stock and huge losses to investors.

On Thursday, advocate Vishal Tiwari mentioned the matter before a bench presided over by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud for listing of his PIL with another plea coming up for hearing on Friday.

The court agreed to tag his PIL with the plea scheduled for hearing on Friday. A bench of CJI and Justices P S Narasimha and J B Pardiwala would consider both the PILs listed as items no 46 and 47 in the cause list.

Advocate Manohar Lal Sharma, who filed the plea, claimed a USA resident Nate Anderson of Hindenburg Research and his Indian entities hatched a criminal conspiracy and did short sale in hundreds of billion dollars prior and thereafter on January 25, 2023 when they released a concocted news as research report qua to the Adani Group of the companies and squared up their short sell position at the lowest rate.

The petitioner raised legal questions about whether SEBI was not duty-bound to suspend trading in the short-selling stock to protect investors and whether intentionally short-selling to crash stock in the share market to square up through concocted artificial means is not a fraud punishable under Sections 420 and 120-B of IPC along with the provisions of the SEBI Act.