The Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) is delighted to invite you to a seminar titled “Balancing Power and Accountability: An Evaluation of SEBIs Adjudication of Insider Trading” on Monday, October 28, 2024 from 12:15 to 1:45 pm (IST) at the CSEP Auditorium, 6, Dr Jose P Rizal Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi – 110021.

The seminar will feature a presentation by Renuka Sane, Managing Director, TrustBridge, followed by a conversation with Jaimini Bhagwati, Distinguished Fellow, CSEP and Former High Commissioner of India to the UK and Janak Raj, Senior Fellow, CSEP.

Please note that this is an in-person event only. If you are in Delhi on the day, please join us for the seminar. The event will be available on the CSEP website and YouTube channel upon completion.

Please register here to attend

About the event 

The paper evaluates the Securities Exchange Board of India’s (SEBI) orders on insider trading matters over a 20-year period, and the performance of the orders in appeal before the Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT). The paper develops an evaluation framework based on elements of the rule of law applicable to regulatory adjudication and finds that in a large number of orders SEBI does not follow the standards laid down in its own laws. The paper also evaluates how these orders have fared at the SAT, and finds an overall appeal rate between 30-38%. This is likely to be higher as orders appealed in more recent years will not have been completed, and hence the data on them is unavailable. Once appealed, almost 60% of orders are modified – that is they are either fully or partially allowed, or the sanction amount is modified. The frequent setbacks suggest that SEBI may need to rethink its approach to enforcement. Finally, the paper makes some suggestions grounded in legal theory on how SEBI could improve its order-writing process.

Presenter

• Renuka Sane is Managing Director at TrustBridge. Her research interests lie in financial markets regulation, the regulatory state, credit and bankruptcy, pensions, and household finance. She was a member of the Task Force of Experts set up by the Employees Provident Fund Organisation to study its pension scheme; of the research team of the Bankruptcy Legislative Reforms Commission on individual insolvency; of the Pension Advisory Committee of the Pension Fund Regulatory Development Authority and the Working Group on personal insolvency at the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India. She has a PhD in Economics from the University of New South Wales and holds an M.A. in Economics from Mumbai University.

Panellists

• Jaimini Bhagwati is a former Indian Foreign Service officer and a financial sector & derivatives specialist. He was appointed India’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom in 2011. Immediately prior to this appointment, Bhagwati was India’s Ambassador to the European Union, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Earlier, he was an Additional Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs and prior to that, Joint Secretary (Capital Markets and Pension Reforms) in the Ministry of Finance and he served in the Department of Atomic Energy in the mid-1980s. He was employed for eleven years in the World Bank Treasury in Washington DC in two phases between 1991 and 2005 and his responsibilities included issuance of World Bank bonds and pricing of associated derivatives transactions. After retiring from Government of India, he was the Reserve Bank of India Chair Professor at ICRIER from 2014 until 2018 and currently he is a Distinguished Fellow at CSEP.He has a Master’s in Physics from St Stephen’s college in Delhi, Master’s in Finance from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and PhD from Tufts University. He has written a number of Working Papers in the World Bank, ICRIER and CSEP.In 2019, he authored The Promise of India: How Prime Ministers Nehru to Modi Shaped the Nation (1947–2019) which was published by Penguin.He has also written columns in several newspapers.As of September 2024, he is an independent Board Member of the Infrastructure Development Finance Company (IDFC) Limited and Apollo Tyres Ltd.
• Janak Raj is a Senior Fellow and leads the macroeconomic segment in the Growth, Finance and Development vertical at CSEP. He also works specifically on fiscal federalism in the health sector, climate finance and multilateral development banks (MDBs) reforms. He is currently also a member of the JM Financial Centre for Financial Research of IIM Udaipur. He has nearly four decades of experience working in the Reserve Bank of India, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Ministry of Finance (Department of Financial Services). Janak Raj served as an Executive Director in the Reserve Bank of India and as a member of its statutory Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). He also served as Principal Adviser of Monetary Policy Department and International Department of the RBI and headed its Department of Economic Policy and Research. At the IMF Washington DC, he was Senior Advisor to the Executive Director for Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Sri Lanka. He served as an RBI nominee director on the Governing Board of the BSE (formerly Bombay Stock Exchange) and as a Senior Consultant in the Department of Financial Services, Ministry of Finance. He has a PhD in Economics from IIT Bombay.

Please contact Gurmeet Kaur at GKaur@csep.org for general queries and Ayesha Manocha at AManocha@csep.org for media queries.