Sunday 17 February, 2008

Anil Ambani Group demands SEBI probe in IPO blues

Blaming a vicious campaign by rival corporate interests for pulling down Reliance Power and other group firms stocks, Anil Ambani Group on Sunday demanded a probe by market regulator SEBI into market abuse that hit millions of investors.

The decline in the Reliance Power stock prices has been compounded by a vicious and orchestrated campaign of market manipulation and market abuse, the company said. Investors in the company lost over Rs 1,700 crore on February 11, day the scrip listed on stock exchanges.

While the company did not name anybody, who it felt had attempted to undermine the ADA Group's "fair name and reputation and caused losses to millions of genuine investors", the statement said that Reliance Power has formally written to SEBI seeking an investigation into the same.

Even before launching the IPO, the group Chairman Anil Ambani had said that it had written a complaint to SEBI but had not received any response on the same.

In its earlier complaint, Reliance Energy, a promoter company of Reliance Power, had named over a dozen top executives and associates of Mukesh Ambani headed Reliance Industries for allegedly sabotaging the IPO.

At that time, a spokesperson of RIL had said that the company had nothing to do with Reliance Power and countered the attack saying Anil Ambani group was raising this to divert attention from the corporate governance issues.

Reliance Power IPO was given a clearance by SEBI only in December, after a prolonged delay, which sources say was due to investigation into various complaints filed with the government and other authorities against the issue.

In its statement today, Reliance Power said that the company has the world's largest shareholder family of nearly 500 overseas and domestic institutional investors and over four million retail investors.

In the run up to its IPO, the company had faced numerous litigations, filed in different courts by some investor group. Even two days before the launch of the IPO, a petition had been filed in the Gujarat High Court seeking a stay. But the company had moved the Supreme Court for relief and launched the issue on January 15.