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The Congress on Saturday raised serious questions over reports of systematic misuse of Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) by the government to benefit the Adani Group and demanded an investigation by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). Senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said that disturbing revelations have just emerged in the media about how the Modani joint venture systematically misused LIC and the savings of its 30 crore policyholders. Internal documents reveal that Indian officials drafted and pushed through a proposal to invest about ₹33,000 crore of LIC funds in various Adani Group companies in May 2025. The reported goals were to “signal confidence in the Adani Group” and to “encourage participation from other investors”, he added. “The question arises: under whose pressure did the officials of the Ministry of Finance and NITI Aayog decide that their job was to bail out a private company facing funding difficulties due to serious allegations of criminality? Is this not a textbook case of “mobile phone banking”?,” Ramesh said. The Congress party claimed that agencies such as the ED, CBI and Income Tax Department were misused to force other private companies to sell their assets to the Adani Group. “The entirety of this Modani MegaScam can only be investigated by a Joint Parliamentary Committee of Parliament that the INC has been demanding for almost three years–ever since we published our 100-question series Hum Adani Ke Hain Kaun (HAHK). As a first step, now at least Parliament’s PAC should fully investigate how LIC was literally forced to make investments in the Adani Group. That will be well within its powers,” Ramesh demanded. The costs of throwing public money at crony firms became clear when LIC suffered a staggering ₹7,850 crore loss in just four hours of trading on 21 September 2024, following the indictment of Gautam Adani and seven of his associates in the US, the senior Congress leader claimed. “Adani has been accused of orchestrating a ₹2,000 crore bribery scheme to secure high-priced solar power contracts in India. The Modi government has refused, for nearly a year, to serve a US SEC summons to the Prime Minister’s most favoured business conglomerate,” he added. The party has claimed that the alliance between prime minister Narendra Modi and industrialist Gautam Adani includes the “rigged” privatisation of critical infrastructure assets such as airports and ports for the benefit of the Adani Group alone. There is misuse of diplomatic resources to funnel contracts to the Adani Group in various countries, especially in India’s neighbourhood, the Congress claimed. “The import of over-invoiced coal by close Adani associates Nasser Ali Shaban Ahli and Chang Chung-Ling using a money-laundering network of shell companies, which contributed to sharp increases in the prices of electricity drawn from Adani power stations in Gujarat,” Ramesh said. Pre-election electricity supply agreements at abnormally high prices in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra and the recent allocation of land at ₹1 per acre for a power plant in poll-bound Bihar are examples, he added. Published on October 25, 2025
