Comment by aprilthird2021 3 days ago
I'm assuming when he says "governments taking a look at" he means like the Indian government and it's more of a Mafia-type "taking a look at" than a serious inquiry with any actual merit. A strongarm type thing
I doubt that's the whole of it, but I'm sure a past pattern definitely comes into play. As someone once said, we are faithfully true to our defects - we tend to repeat our mistakes.
Someone who plays fast and loose with the law to get their sales bonus doesn't just find Jesus and give up one day. More likely he gets promoted and does it all over again.
But some of the short seller research I've heard of like interviewing ex-employees about internal irregularities is quite clever.
In another case (I think it was a different short seller) he went to the actual physical locations declared on paperwork as "offices" and found them to be empty warehouses.
So this kind of interviewing and boots on ground stuff is next level.
But the Indian regulator was going after the short seller suggesting they used non public info. Turns out India is corrupt which we already knew as a fact and one of the chiefs owned the stock.
The source is their research. Much of which was publicly available.
You can draw your own conclusions but a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars being audited by a mom and pop shop is more evidence than anyone needs that their books are made up.
The fact that the Adani group couldn’t refute any of their claims was pretty telling as well.
Yeah not like Hindenburg researched a large Indian company with close ties to the BJP.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/3/1/modi-govt-allowed...
I think its brought attention to numerous cases of accounting and other shenanigans.
What I've noticed, casually, is that they often target companies or management with a pattern of fraud and abuse, and surprise they keep doing it.
VP of Sales gets slapped on the wrist for illegal tactics?
A few years later he goes on to be promoted to CEO and.... does the same thing!
Amazing.