‘Give SEBI Time To Understand What Happened’ FM Nirmala Sitharaman Breaks Silence On Adani Stock Rout 

Just a week after presenting the Union Budget 2023-24, India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has now opened up about the Adani Group stock rout amid Hindenburg Research’s accounting fraud, stock manipulation, and money laundering allegations against the conglomerate.

SEBI Should Be Given Time to Understand

FM Sitharaman has stated that SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India) should be given time to investigate and process what had happened.

“I think SEBI should be given time to come up clearly on understanding how this happened & what has actually happened… I think it is now time for them to get a comprehensive picture, and I am sure they would do it,” Sitharaman said in an interview with ET Now.

She was asked about the heavy selloff in Adani stocksin the last couple of weeks. While praising the role of regulatory bodies in India, the finance minister said the regulators are very capable and match their peers elsewhere.

“I will not buy for a moment anyone saying Indian governance or the regulatory mechanisms are not good enough. In fact, in very many areas, we seem to be leading the way in terms of good governance,”

Nirmala Sitharaman said, adding that Indian regulators are well-seized in what they have to do and they will do the needful where and when necessary.

SEBI’s statement 

SEBI has said that it seeks to maintain the orderly and efficient functioning of the market and has also put in place a set of well-defined, publicly available surveillance measures (including the ASM framework) to address excessive volatility in specific stocks.

“This mechanism gets automatically triggered under certain conditions of price volatility in any stock,” it quoted, as per an ET report.

Adani Stocks Recovering slowly.

After falling heavily and rapidly on most days in the past two weeks, many of Adani Group’s stocks have fared better in the last 2 days.

Yesterday, Adani Enterprises is up 11%, Adani Transmission and Adani Power are each up 5%, and Adani Ports is up 6%.

As per the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Gautam Adani is currently ranked 21 on the rich list with a net worth of $57.6 billion, which was earlier at $120 billion just before the Hindenburg research report came out and went viral on January 24, 2023.