Popular business journalist and author Sucheta Dalal went trending on Twitter with people speculating that her tweet caused a sharp drop in the share prices of Adani group of companies on Monday.
Dalal tweeted about the possible “rigging” in the shares of a particular stock by an operator. Though she didn’t take names, many speculated that she was talking about the Adani companies.
“Another scandal hard to prove outside the black box of information available with SEBI tracking systems is the return of an operator of the past who is relentlessly rigging prices of one group. All through foreign entities! His speciality & that of a former FM. Nothing changes!”, Dalal tweeted.
The stock prices of the Adani group of companies fell by 5-25 per cent on Monday after the National Securities Depository limited (NSDL) froze the accounts of three foreign funds that have high stakes in the company. Rumor spread that this was due to Dalal’s tweet.
Dalal is famous for her reportage which exposed the 1992 Harshad Mehta securities scam.
The three foreign funds – Albula Investment Fund, Cresta Fund, and APMS Investment Fund – together own a Rs. 43,500 crore worth of shares in the company.
Though the reason behind the freeze has not been known yet, an Economic Times report suggests that this could be due “insufficient disclosure of information regarding beneficial ownership” according to the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). Following this, shares of Adani Enterprises dropped 20 per cent while that of Adani Ports by 19 per cent.
Meanwhile, Twitter erupted with memes and jokes, celebrating the whole incident. A lot of Twitteratis began drawing parallels between Sucheta Dalal and Elon Musk. Musk’s several tweets have recently gone viral and have caused fluctuations in the prices of many crypto currencies.
However, the Adani group of companies denied the freezing of the three foreign accounts and called such reports “erroneous” and “misleading”.
“We regret to mention that these reports are blatantly erroneous and are done to deliberately mislead the investing community. This is causing irreparable loss of economic value to the investors at large and reputation of the group,” it said in a statement.