After stock fraud, Adani faces allegations of manipulating Wikipedia pages using puppet accounts

The Adani group is already trying to undo the damage caused by Hindenburg's allegations of fraud with little success, and its troubles keep on mounting. The conglomerate has already lost $132 billion in market value, and its stocks have been downgraded, while its global partner TotalEnergies has halted a major green hydrogen project. As it faces questions about market fraud, Adani has now been accused of manipulating information about it on Wikipedia.

Hindenburg refusing to back down

Continuing his relentless offensive against Adani, Hindenburg Research founder Nate Anderson tweeted an article by Wikipedia's independent newsletter, The Signpost.

It mentioned how Adani has been using a network of puppet accounts and paid editors to fill up Wikipedia with data fed by the group, and to remove specific parts. Nine articles about the Adani family and their businesses using such methods, while evidence about conflict of interest was removed from the pages.

From shell companies to puppet accounts

One such paid editor which populated the Adani Group page with non-neutral content, was also found to be using the company's IP address by The Signpost. Wikipedia had even blocked two single purpose accounts Adanigrouponline and Adani Group, meant to tweak and rewrite only Adani-related articles, between 2013 and 2014.

Removing conflict of interest notices

The report mentioned how an unregistered user made changes one Wikipedia article on Adani, but left the content by an Adani employee Satyam Trivedi untouched. A conflict of interest notice added on top of the article minutes after this, was also removed by Adanigrouponline.

This recent report by The Signpost has emerged when the Adani Group's statements and reassurances to investors have failed to stop its stock market rout. The firm has also tried to make the Adani stock sell off look like the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy, while Hindenburg attacked it for using nationalism to get away with fraud.