Under the radar

Many eyebrows have been raised at the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s (Sebi) silence over the shenanigans at SHCIL. While the regulator has gone after depositories, it has not even bothered to inspect the largest SHCIL, the largest Depository Participant (DP). In fact, it aided SSL by granting it registration to start a competing DP business, a brokerage operation and a portfolio advisory service in record time over the past year, without even checking SSL’s shareholding structure.

Tripura institute dropped

At SHCIL’s board meeting on June 2, which was held under police protection, the board decided to drop a proposal to set up a securities market training institution at Tripura, where it has obtained 3.5 acres of land free of cost from the state government. Why would SHCIL want to set up a securities training institute at all? And why set up one at Tripura or even the North-East, when it has hardly any investor population, nor is well connected to Mumbai by air? SHCIL’s new management found no justification for the move and decided to give up the land that was allotted as recently as on March 24 , 2007.

What’s new?

As anticipated by us, the board meeting on June 2 decided to remove R Jayaraman Iyer, A T Pannir Selvam (former Union Bank chairman) and T Naramsiha Rao (independent) as directors from SHCIL. These moves will be formalised at the Extraordinary General Meeting to be held on June 20. R K Bansal, the new man in charge at SHCIL, has initiated several changes that he hopes will restore staff morale. An HR consultant has been appointed to study staff issues and a long list of other consultants has been sacked. Unfortunately, this has done little to boost morale because of the enormous powers bestowed on Borker, who according to the SHCIL staff, remains Bansal’s key lieutenant.