Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi continued to deflect opposition pressure over his said links with billionaire Gautam Adani who’s battling allegations of fraud and market manipulation from a US short seller.
(Bloomberg) — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi continued to deflect opposition pressure over his said links with billionaire Gautam Adani who’s battling allegations of fraud and market manipulation from a US short seller.
Modi spoke in the upper house of parliament, his second speech in the legislature in as many days, amid chants of “Modi-Adani are brothers” from the opposition benches Thursday. Modi ignored the heckling, as he had done a day earlier, and continued to take potshots at the Congress party.
“The Congress only engaged in tokenism and never tried to find permanent solutions to the problems facing the country,” Modi said. “To build modern India, we have focused on creating infrastructure with scale and speed.”
The opposition has been drawing attention to the ties between Adani and the prime minister and to the tycoon’s meteoric growth that mirrors Modi’s own political journey to the top elected office. Modi continued to avoid any direct reference to Adani’s troubles and the opposition allegations.
Modi’s opponents have also been highlighting that millions of small investors could be at risk because of the exposure of state-owned institutions in Adani’s businesses and demanding a probe by a panel of lawmakers.
US short seller, Hindenburg Research accusations against the Adani Group came Jan. 24 and the conglomerate has since shed about $100 billion in market value. It has repeatedly denied the charges in the report.
(Updates with details. A previous version of this story corrected the spelling of Gautam Adani’s name in the first paragraph.)
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