Sebi board meet today

Sebi board meet today
ENS ECONOMIC BUREAU

MUMBAI, MAR 14: Capital market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India will hold its board meeting in New Delhi on Thursday amidst the crisis on the bourses and far reaching measures taken to stabilise and effect orderly functioning of the market.

The meeting, which would be chaired by Sebi chairman D R Mehta, will take stock of the market situation and discuss ways of implementing steps announced by Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, including corporatisation of bourses, introduction of rolling settlement and steps to protect the interests of investors.

Mehta had come under sharp attack for Sebi's failure to check insider trading and share manipulation in the market which brought down the Sensex by over 700 points after the budget. There were demands for Mehta's resignation from certain quarters but Sinha yesterday gave a clean chit to the Sebi chairman saying his "integrity was unquestionable" and the regulator had acted swiftly to deal with the situation.

òF3ó 1998 price rigging case: òF39óAfter an inexplicable delay, the controversial price rigging case of 1998 involving BPL, Sterlite and Videocon has reached a decisive stage with Sebi deciding to fix dates for hearings in the case later this month and in early April. Harshad Mehta's hearing will be held this month itself.

Sebi sources said that the dates are being fixed and the case is now set for a decisive stage, and that Sebi had been waiting to resolve the issue of whether witnesses in the case would be cross-examined or not. Sebi is against allowing the witnesses to be cross-examined, since it feels that some of them may be won over, and it would set a dangerous precedent for all future Sebi cases.

Sebi has now secured a strong legal opinion which, while underscoring the importance of cross-examination of witnesses, is also reported to have said that it is also Sebi's discretion to allow cross-examination of witnesses or otherwise. While no Sebi official is commenting on this, indications available suggest that Sebi may not want to have the witnesses cross-examined.