Short-seller slams Vedanta AGM: Calls ‘Annual General Mockery of stakeholders’
US based short-seller Viceroy Research criticized Vedanta Ltd’s Annual General Meeting (AGM), calling it a ‘stage-managed’ event and a ‘preposterous mockery’ that neither encouraged questions from investors, nor meaningfully answered them.
As per the short-seller, Vedanta followed this up with a stage-managed AGM event, where the Q&A of approximately 2 hours consisted almost entirely of extremely long speeches praising Anil Agarwal specifically by likely VEDL plants. One caller praised Mr Agarwal in song. The US-based company reiterated that Vedanta released the statement despite “being unable to disprove a single point in our report and complaining that we had not engaged with management (who we have shown are habitually dishonest)”. Earlier in July , Viceroy Research had issued a report on Vedanta Resources (VRL), saying the company “resembles a Ponzi scheme”. The short-seller had said that the “entire group structure is financially unsustainable, operationally compromised”. According to their report the Group “poses a severe, under-appreciated risk to creditors".
Responding to the report, the mining conglomerate had issued a statement calling it “a malicious combination of selective misinformation and baseless allegations” The report is a malicious combination of selective misinformation and baseless allegations to discredit the Group. It has been issued without making any attempt to contact us with the sole objective of creating false propaganda.
Viceroy has accused VRL of draining cash from VEDL. One way is by charging branding fees even from subsidiaries like Hindustan Zinc, and ESL Steel that do not use the brand name. Except Vedanta Ltd, none of the companies paying brand fees make any meaningful use of the Vedanta brand name, but collectively they paid $361.3 million in brand fees in FY25. Vedanta Ltd has paid Vedanta Resources $1.16 billion in brand fees and strategic services over the past four years.
