The Government of India has appointed a committee to review the Competition Act, 2002 to review the law and come up with recommendations to strengthen and re-calibrate the law. The Committee is expected to finish its work within three months of its first meeting. I wrote a column in the Business Standard earlier this week pointing out a few areas of low-hanging fruit that need attention. ...
A Tribunal Benched
The Securities Appellate Tribunal has yet again been rendered dysfunctional. I wrote a piece in the Business Standard last week about how, yet again, the functioning of the tribunal for substantive final hearings has come to a halt. As the appellate tribunal that is exclusively empowered to hear appeals against every order of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, the Insurance Regulatory...
A Material Mistake in Disclosure Obligations
The newly notified SEBI (Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations, 2015, which would take effect on December 1, 2015 remove materiality as a relevant factor for disclosures of “acquisitions” by listed companies. The term “acquisitions” has been defined to mean acquisition of 5% in any other company and a movement of 2% in shareholding thereafter...
Financial Sector Legislation, Anti-terror Laws, Human Rights and the Indian Constitution
We all now know that the Supreme Court outlawed Section 66-A of the Information Technology Act in a recent order. I wrote about the court’s core findings in a column in the Mirror publications last Friday. I would have been remiss in not writing about the court’s rationale in the very same judgement, in refusing to strike down as unconstitutional, a different section of the...
New Delisting Regulations – tougher rather than easier
New regulations on delisting have been approved by SEBI. I wrote a column on December 1, 2014 (print edition) of the Business Standard, on how a new element of requiring at least 25% of the public shareholders as of a certain date to have participated in selling their shares, would nudge toward counter-productive outcomes. I have pasted the copy below. Earlier, Umakanth had commented...
With great power comes great responsibility: SAT
The abuse of extreme powers in financial regulatory laws has been subject matter of litigation for the past two decades – particularly since the mid-1990s when SEBI started using the (then) newly-introduced Section 11B of the SEBI Act, 1992. The power to “issue such directions as deemed fit” is a sweeping and general one. The use of such powers without even...
“Make in India” frustrated by regulations “Made in India”
The Delisting Regulations applicable in India have been controversial since inception. Earlier this year, SEBI published a discussion paper seeking to review them. This Blog commented on the discussion paper here. Earlier this week, in my column in Business Standard, I wrote about how tinkering with the Delisting Regulations will not be of help. The Delisting Regulations is a body of...
Securities Appellate Tribunal reads the Riot Act for judicial indiscipline
In an important reminder to regulatory agencies to adhere to judicial discipline, the Securities Appellate Tribunal has passed an order setting aside an adjudication order passed by the Securities and Exchange Board of India for ignoring the ratio laid down in another order passed by another adjudicating officer. The SAT has directed that the matter be placed before another adjudicating...
The crisis that SAT is heading towards
On November 1, 2012, this blog had a post on a writ petition relating to the absence of a Presiding Officer in the Securities Appellate Tribunal (“SAT”). I wrote a piece in the Business Standard in my column on November 12, 2012 about how the SAT needs to be handled with care. Since then, some more facts have become apparent. One of the remaining two members of the SAT will...
FSLRC invites comments on approach paper
The Financial Sector Legislative Reform Commission has published its approach paper here. The Commission was set up to review the legal architecture for the financial sector and come up with findings and recommendations on aligning the Indian financial sector legal system with India’s current economic standing. The Commission has invited feedback from the public as part of the...
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