New Delhi: Rejecting petitions on Adani probe, the apex court said the power of this court to enter the domain of SEBI is limited. It found no valid grounds to direct SEBI to regulate its amendments made in exercise of delegated legislative powers.
The apex court rejected the 4 public interest petitions against the Adani group, , saying the reliance on OCCPR report has been rejected and reliance on a third party organisation report without any verification cannot be relied upon as a proof. SC said power of this court to enter the domain of SEBI is limited, asking the regulator to take logical conclusions in accordance with the law.
The apex court said no case made out that the FPI regulations were diluted to allow mischief, adding that disclosure norms have only been tightened, now at par with PMLA.
A three-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud had reserved the petition filed by Anamika Jaiswal, through advocate Prashant Bhushan, who had argued that the earlier committee, headed by former Supreme Court judge Justice A.M. Sapre, had a “conflict of interest” on the issue.
Mr. Bhushan had contended that one of the committee members, O.P. Bhatt, a former chairman of the State Bank of India, is Chairman of Greenko, a leading renewable energy company. Since March 2022, Greenko and the Adani Group have worked in a close partnership to provide energy to Adani Group facilities in India, he submitted.
The senior lawyer had also trained his guns on advocate Somasekhar Sundaresan, another committee member who was recently appointed an Additional Judge of the Bombay High Court. Mr. Bhushan said that Mr. Sundaresan had appeared as a lawyer for the Adani Group in 2006 and had been on “several SEBI committees”.
Hindenburg’s report, published in January 2023, claimed “brazen accounting fraud” and “stock manipulation” by the Gautam Adani-led group. Though the conglomerate rejected the report as “unresearched” and “maliciously mischievous”, it triggered a massive rout of Adani group stocks, which lost over $140 billion in days and forced the cancellation of a €20,000 crore share sale.
The SC on March 2, 2023, set up a six-member panel, led by retired Supreme Court judge AM Sapre, to look into regulatory failure by Sebi and alleged breach of laws by the Adani group. In its report submit- ted in May, the committee said the allegations of stock price manipulation or violation of MPS norms by Adani group companies cannot be proved “at this stage”.
At the same time, the panel raised certain red flags regarding the current Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPI) regulations, contending that Sebi, in its legislative capacity, had itself done away with the prohibition against any FPI having an “opaque structure” in 2018 and 2019, which could be a reason why Sebi’s probe to look into possible violation of the MPS norms by Adani companies using 13 overseas entities has “drawn a blank so far”.
Comments are closed.