A four-member delegation of Trinamool Congress MPs plans to directly petition the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) on Tuesday to probe the possible stock market manipulation and insider trading that they allege happened around the exit polls and election results.

The TMC delegation is likely to be joined by an MP each from the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray) and NCP (Sharad Pawar).

This decision is a follow-up to the letter written by Trinamul MP Derek O’Brien to Sebi earlier this week seeking the probe and also a meeting. Though Sebi has not responded, the Trinamool has decided to go ahead with its plan to go to Mumbai on Tuesday.

The Trinamool and the Congress have for over a week been alleging stock market manipulation “which happened on the back of misleading exit polls for the Lok Sabha Elections’’.

However, the Trinamool has not reached out to the Congress to join the delegation, keeping the distance that saw the two parties fight each other during the elections while being in the INDIA bloc.

Flagging the spike in markets on June 3 after the exit poll results and the crash on result day, O’Brien in his letter referred to the India Today-Axis MyIndia poll and pointed out that the discrepancy between the exit poll predictions and the actual results in Bengal was over 150 per cent.

“These unrealistic numbers misled investors when the markets, buoyed by the exit poll predictions, surged massively on Monday, 3rd June. The same investors suffered over ₹30 lakh crore in losses when the markets subsequently crashed on the day of results. Agencies conducting exit polls had a huge bearing on the stock markets. Therefore, it is important to know whether any of these agencies had manipulated their predictions to influence the markets. In addition, the issue of whether any individuals or entities involved with the exit polls made huge profits/gains on 3rd June merits an investigation as that would tantamount to insider trading.’’

Citing reports of some of these pollsters conducting surveys for foreign institutional investors, O’Brien said there was a conflict of interest involved in that case.

The letter also refers to the remarks made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah during the campaign urging people to invest in the markets with the promise of a boom on June 4. Given the heft their word carries, he said it should be probed whether there was an attempt by them to influence the markets and how many NDA politicians benefited from the spike in the markets due to the exit polls.