An arrangement involving a third party security is not uncommon in commercial financing transactions. Here, a person (“A”) creates a security in favour a creditor (“B”) who provides financing to a third party (“C”). While a number of contract law and commercial law issues likely arise in such third party security, of immediate relevance is a scenario where A were to become insolvent in terms of...
Corporate Ownership in Private Banks: Setting the Cat among the Pigeons
[Pramod Rao is Group General Counsel, ICICI Bank. This post represents his personal views] With the release of the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) Report of the internal working group to review extant ownership guidelines and corporate structure for Indian private sector banks, several articles and commentaries have been published. What has attracted attention has been a...
Towards a Proportionate Regulatory Framework for Virtual Currencies
[Anshul Semwal is a 5th year B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) student at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore] On April 6, 2018, the Reserve Bank of India (‘RBI’), a staunch critic of virtual currencies (‘VCs’), issued a circular banning the trade of VCs. The ban was short-lived as, two years later, the Supreme Court quashed the circular on the ground of proportionality in Internet and Mobile...
The Banking Regulation (Amendment) Ordinance 2020: A New Beginning?
[Manasvini Vyas is a 5th year student at National Law University Odisha] On 26 June 2020, the Banking Regulation Act, 1949 (“the Act”) was amended by way of a presidential ordinance (the Ordinance’). The amendment seeks to bring urban cooperative banks (‘UCBs’) and multi-state cooperative banks (‘MCBs’) under the complete regulatory control of the RBI. This development assumes significance in the...
Cutting Corners through RBI’s Special Liquidity Scheme
[Shreya Dagar is a 3rd year B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) student at National Law University Jodhpur] In order to provide relief to non-banking finance companies (“NBFCs”), housing financing companies (“HFCs”) and microfinance institutions against the pandemic struck economy, the Government has approved a special liquidity scheme providing short-term liquidity to these entities. Earlier, the Reserve Bank...
Decriminalisation of Section 138: A Half-Baked Remedy
[Srihari Gopal and Vedant Malpani are fifth year students at Gujarat National Law University, Gandhinagar] On June 8, 2020, the Ministry of Finance released a notification inviting comments on a proposal to decriminalise 39 minor offences. The proposal comes in a long line of measures initiated by the government to revive businesses and ‘unburden’ the courts in light of the Covid-19 related...
Draft Framework for Securitisation of Standard Assets: Re-modelling the Indian Securities Market
[Adesh Sharma and Saksham Shrivastav are 3rd year B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) students at National University of Study and Research in Law, Ranchi] In an attempt to regulate the securities market in a more sophisticated direction and open up newer avenues, the Reserve Bank of India (‘RBI’) on June 8,2020 introduced the ‘Draft Framework for Securitisation of Standard Assets’ (‘Framework’)...
A Banker’s Tax: Accepting the Inevitability of Bailouts and Enhancing Government Response
[Karan Kamath is a 2020 B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) graduate from Symbiosis Law School, Pune] Since the 2008 financial crisis, regulators around the world have made regulations more stringent to prevent, inter alia,bank collapses and resultant bailouts. Governments maintain that bailouts are not something they wish to repeat. However, bailouts have been resorted to rather commonly. A 2016 economics...
How Banking Business Works: A Banking Lawyer’ Perspective
[Pramod Rao is Group General Counsel, ICICI Bank. He sets out a simplified explanation of a very complex system, broken down to basics. This post represents his personal views] Banks take deposits and pay interest on them. Banks lend money and receive interest on them. The difference between the two is margin. The margin pays for costs, such as employees’ salaries, branch rent and infrastructure...
RBI’s Discussion Paper on Bank Governance
Corporate governance in banks and financial institutions has captured a great deal of attention lately in India. One may attribute this to high profile episodes involving governance issues in banks such as ICICI Bank as well as Yes Bank, both involving the former chief executive officers (CEOs). There is generally a sense that universal corporate governance norms prescribed by the securities...
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