Activist lawyer Manohar Lal Sharma on Friday filed a PIL in the Supreme Court seeking the criminal prosecution of Nathan Anderson — founder of short-selling firm Hindenburg Research — because its charges against the Adani group caused a massive crash of the stock market that resulted in heavy losses to thousands of Indian investors.

Besides Anderson, Sharma has sought criminal prosecution of all those short-selling traders in India who allegedly conspired with Hindenburg Research in bringing down the stock market prices in India through what he called, “concocted artificial means”.

The PIL said: “Short sellers, i.e. Anderson resident of USA and his Indian entities hatched a criminal conspiracy and did short sale in hundreds of billion dollars prior and thereafter on 25th January 2023 they released a concocted news as research report qua to the Adani Group of the companies, got crash share market (sic) and squared up their short sell position at the lowest rate.”

“They secured billions of profits by butchering citizens of India. However, Sebi did not suspend trading in the stock especially qua to the Adani group of the companies and allowed short sellers to exploit innocent investors (sic),” Sharma’s petition said.

Sharma is a popular PIL petitioner in the Supreme Court: he had earlier filed the PILs in the infamous 2G spectrum scandal and the coal allocation scandals during the erstwhile Congress-led UPA regime.

He also challenged the recent ban of the BBC documentary on the post-2002 Godhra riots by the NDA government. He had also filed petitions questioning the credentials of several Supreme Court judges in the post.

The public interest litigation matter filed by advocate M.L. Sharma also seeks directions for declaring short selling an offence of fraud against the investors, to be prosecutable under section 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), read with the provisions of the Sebi Act.

Sharma told PTI that his PIL has been registered and numbered by the apex court registry.

The PIL seeks the court’s directions for the registration of an FIR, recovery of the short sellers’ turnover, their prosecution to protect the citizens of India and further action against them for “duping the Indian share market and innocent investors for their vested interest to provide complete justice”.