SCAM Version 2.0 ?
“Ab meri tarah Risk se ishq hai to kood pado, ya to duboge ya udoge”
Dekho mein Cigarette nahi pita per jeb me lighter jarur rakhta hoon Dhamakka karne ke liye.
Every one might have heard these quotes somewhere or the other or watched the show from which these were took, in fact the fame of the show is so high that people are comparing the show with Breaking Bad! It might be even surprising to hear that at least one in every Indian family might have watched this series or kept the theme as her ringtone ( I’m that one person for my family, and my review you ask- well, a must watch series though ! Yes, there are many culprits like me out there !) Now coming to the point, this was a real life story with some Bollywood elements talking about a scam in 1992, involving Harshad Mehta which was brought out by a journalist named Sucheta Dalal (again this was just for that small minority who haven't heard about the show), and lately something happened which again shook the business arena and our story is about it only !
What exactly happened ?
Recently a month back, there was a tweet from Sucheta regarding the possibility of a big scam involving a very big group in India, and at the same timeline , shares of a big company fell drastically and people started joining dots and associating the alleged scam and the particular group of companies. Let’s first see what the tweet was:
After this tweet, very soon the dots were connected with the Adani group of companies, and a stock rally that started last year for the Adani group of companies finally stopped and wiped out almost 54,000 Crores INR in market cap for the group. Yes very huge isn’t it ! Now what exactly happened a few days before all this was a notification from NSDL(National Securities Depository Limited) stating that it had seized trading accounts of three Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPI), who held a total sum around 43,500 Crores INR in Adani Shares. As per the NSDL website, the depository has frozen the accounts of Albula Investment Fund Ltd, Cresta Fund Ltd and APMS Investment Fund Ltd as of May 31, 2021. So the doubts grew as people started believing that the big FM as per Sucheta is the Adani groups.
I know this might be a bit confusing for some of us ( I understand, because I was also in the same situation while reading about it), so let me break this down for you; according to Sucheta’s tweet, a big company is using its FPI (in simple terms: its foreign players) to increase its stocks price and has lead to a very big scam. She says its hard to prove due to some loopholes in the tracking system. She says this is a very similar technique from the past.
Now, how were the dots connected?
At the same timeline, the Securities Dept of our Government, release a notification stating that it had seized the three above mentioned companies’ trading accounts, who had a huge amount of shares in the Adani group. Now I guess you might understand what dots were connected and how this thought came up regarding a new scam and the players involved. Later, the NSDL clarified that the frozen accounts had no connection with them being investors in Adani Group of Companies and is rather a completely unrelated case of June 2016, and they are free to trade in Adani shares. All the listed Adani Group companies including Adani Power, Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone, Adani Enterprises, Adani Total Gas, Adani Green Energy and Adani Transmission said to the BSE and the National Stock Exchange (NSE) separately that they have confirmation from the Registrar and Transfer Agent that the accounts have not been frozen.
IDK, suddenly one of my brain cell had a doubt, wasn’t this the case with Scam of 1992 also, starting with a doubt, loopholes, dot connections , initially left unnoticed later shaking the whole fundamentals of the country’s financial architecture, then later I had to convince it saying not everything is a scam, but now I’m in doubts ! (poor me)
But one thing to be noted or to learn is that, history is read always to make sure that mistakes which happened in the past, should never repeat. We make real life movies or series not just for making a propaganda, but for learning from it and correcting our mistakes and strengthening the systems which led to such mistakes go unnoticed. There are many such examples which did this sort of rewind and learn, like The green mile, Chernobyl, The American crime story etc. But we still have the loopholes for such SCAMS to occur again and the players to get out of this easily without any proof!
I’ll leave this here for you to decide if this really was SCAM 2.0 or not ? But remember there will always be a SCAM 2.0 in the future if we don’t learn from past and just keep listening to the SCAM 1992 background music!
