Mumbai, July 4: The battle between the Ambani brothers escalated today with the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group demanding an investigation by the market regulator into the sustained hammering of the Reliance Communications (R-Com) stock by “rival groups”.

The R-Com stock has tumbled 19.3 per cent since May 26 — the day that R-Com announced that it was opening talks with MTN of South Africa to try and forge a telecom megalith with operations spanning 22 countries.

“Taking advantage of the falling market, rival interests are manipulating the market by short selling the stock and causing it to fall further. This happened the whole of this week, starting Monday (June 30),” said R-Com sources. The stock had fallen 11.9 per cent from Monday till the close on Thursday.

Although they stopped short of blaming Reliance Industries and its affiliates for the bear hammering, R-Com sources charged the elder scion Mukesh of orchestrating “a desperate attempt to derail the MTN discussions” and “hurting the interests of two million R-Com investors”.

Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) has written two letters to R-Com and MTN asserting its right of first refusal to any stake sale at the telecom company. It has also indicated that it would aggressively contest any stake sale in R-Com. On Thursday, RIL invited R-Com to start conciliation talks failing which it threatened to start formal arbitration proceedings.

The Anil camp has maintained that RIL’s claims were an “unfortunate reflection of its better corporate rivalry” and that the elder brother was becoming increasingly desperate and frustrated by the success of ADAG.

This is the second time that Anil has demanded an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Board of India into stock market shenanigans relating to one of his company’s stocks.

The R-Com stock rallied smartly today to Rs 438.20 on the BSE — a gain of 13.7 per cent, or Rs 53.10, from Thursday’s close.