In new attack on PM, Congress quotes from his G20 speeches in 2014, 2018
The Congress has been demanding a probe into dealings of Gautam Adani’s group after US research firm Hindenburg alleged “irregularities” in its January report
NEW DELHI: The Congress on Saturday renewed its attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the Adani issue, contrasting PM Modi’s repeated appeals to the international community at previous G20 summits to crack down on corruption and money laundering with its reluctance to order a full-fledged probe against the group.
Saturday’s statement by the Congress was timed to coincide with the start of the G20 Summit in New Delhi.
In a statement, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said that as the 2023 G20 Summit begins in Delhi, it was worth recalling PM Modi’s many exhortations at previous meetings of the grouping,
At the 2014 Brisbane G20 meeting, the prime minister called for global cooperation “to eliminate safe havens for economic offenders”, to “track down and unconditionally extradite money launderers” and to “break down the web of complex international regulations and excessive banking secrecy that hide the corrupt and their deeds”, the Congress leader said. At the 2018 Buenos Aires G20 summit, PM Modi presented a nine-point agenda “for action against fugitive economic offences and asset recovery”, he said.
“The PM’s brazenness would be laughable if his complicity in high-level corruption and economic offences were not so serious. The PM has not simply facilitated the creation of Modi-made Monopolies (3M) for his close friends, the Adanis, in critical sectors like ports, airports, power and roads using all the tools at his disposal, he has systematically blocked all investigations into Adani’s wrongdoing by agencies as varied as SEBI, CBI, ED, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) and the Serious Fraud Investigation Office...,” Jairam Ramesh charged.
“The G20 slogan this year is ‘One Earth, One Family, One Future’. However, the PM actually seems to believe in “One Man, One Government, One Business Group”.
The Congress has been demanding the constitution of a joint parliamentary committee to probe the Adani Group after the release of the Hindenburg report on 24 January that accused the Gautam Adani-led group of “brazen accounting fraud” and “stock manipulation”.
The Adani Group, however, denied allegations of stock market manipulation and accounting fraud by Hindenburg but the charges triggered a massive rout of Adani Group stocks and forced the cancellation of a ₹20,000 crore share sale in the group’s flagship.
A six-member panel, led by former Supreme Court judge AM Sapre, was set up by the Supreme Court on March 2 to investigate allegations of regulatory failure and breach of laws against the Adani group and to suggest steps to bolster the statutory and supervisory regime.
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