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.
In a statement released on July 14, Viceroy Research said, “…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 short-seller went on to rebut Vedanta’s July 9 press release that had called Viceroy’s report a ‘false propaganda’. 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)”.
Here’s the background to it
Earlier on July 9, 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”. A spokesperson from Vedanta Group had said, “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 vs Vedanta continues
Further, Viceroy said that it did send the company an extensive correspondence on July 11, 2025, and have still received no response or acknowledgement.
Vedanta’s demerger plans – A timeline that doesn’t add up, says Viceroy
Two years after it was first announced, Vedanta’s ambitious demerger plan remains mired in delays, litigation, and deep structural concerns. During the company AGM, Chairman Anil Agarwal assured shareholders that the demerger would be finalized “before September”. At the AGM last week, he had said, “We are absolutely confident that before September [2025] it is the time that it should happen.”
However, Viceroy argued that this projection is not only premature but unrealistic, given the mounting legal and regulatory barriers still facing the company. Even so, Viceroy maintained, “…the demerger will do nothing to fix the fundamental issues at VEDL’s operating subsidiaries, which will be saddled with unsustainable debt.”
It is worth noting that the current September 2025 completion date represents a 12-month delay from the originally communicated completion date.
