Veena Venugopal

Mumbai , Feb. 23

THE newly appointed Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, Mr M. Damodaran, on Wednesday called on Mr Justice Kumar Rajaratnam, Presiding Officer of the Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT).

Mr Damodaran spent close to an hour at SAT's office this afternoon. The meeting assumes significance as SEBI has been increasingly embarrassed with the tribunal setting aside a lot of orders passed by SEBI in the recent past. The three-member tribunal has also been often critical about SEBI's investigations and orders.

Several high profile orders, including the one barring Mr Samir Arora from accessing the capital markets for a period of five years in one of the most talked about insider trading charges in the country, have been set aside by SAT. In this order, the Tribunal also rapped the knuckles of the previous Chairman, Mr G.N. Bajpai, for speaking to the media about the case, just after the interim order on Mr Arora was passed and while the matter was pending enquiry. In an interview, Mr Bajpai had said that SEBI was confident about nailing the Alliance Capital's former Chief Investment Officer, Mr Samir Arora, on insider trading charges.

Though SEBI has been claiming that 70 per cent of its orders are upheld at the Tribunal, in categories of complaints such as fee continuity etc. SEBI's success rate at the Tribunal has been much lower.

SEBI also stopped publishing order passed by SAT on its Web site for over ten months. It was alleged that the poor performance of SEBI's orders at SAT was the reason SEBI stopped publishing these. SEBI, however, said that it had been instructed by SAT not to publish these order, while SAT maintained that their orders were public and no permission was necessary to publish them.

Now that the ambiguity about the post of the Chairman of SEBI has been removed, it is also expected that the announcements regarding the replacement at the Tribunal would be made soon.

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