New Delhi: The Bombay high court has stayed the order of a special court for a first information report to be registered against former Securities and Exchange Board of India chairperson Madhabi Puri Buch and other SEBI and Bombay Stock Exchange officials in connection with a listing fraud case.
Bar and Bench has reported that a single-judge bench of Justice S.G. Dige granted relief after Buch and two others challenged the order.
The lower court’s order came on March 1. The high court’s relief came within 48 hours.
The high court claimed that the special court had passed the order “mechanically without going to details and without attributing any role to the applicants.”
The special Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) court in Mumbai had also directed police to name against three of SEBI’s “whole-time members” – Ashwani Bhatia, Ananth Narayan G, and Kamlesh Chandra Varshney – and two senior individuals at the Bombay Stock Exchange – Pramod Agarwal and Sundararaman Ramamurthy – in the FIR.
Buch, Bhatia and Agarwal approached the high court against this order on March 3.
Judge Shashikant Eknathrao Bangar’s order had been noteworthy because it had been in response to a civilian complaint under Section 156(3) of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC). Sapan Shrivastava, a Mumbai journalist, had filed the appeal. When the police refuse to file a case, a litigant can, under Section 156(3) of the CrPC, move the court for directions to register the FIR.
As The Wire has reported, Shrivastava has said that he and his family had invested in shares of Cals Refineries Ltd in 1994, which was listed at BSE India, and suffered huge losses. He claimed that SEBI and the officials of BSE did not act against the crimes of the company and instead listed it illegally, failing to protect the interests of investors.
In August last year, Madhabi Puri Buch and her husband Dhavan Buch were both in the news after an investigation by the short-seller Hindenburg Research claimed they had “undisclosed investments” in offshore entities linked to the Adani Group.
While SEBI had stated in the immediate aftermath that Buch had recused herself from matters of potential conflict of interest, it then said in response to a Right to Information (RTI) application that the matters in which she had recused herself are “not readily available and collating the same will lead to disproportionately diverting the resources of the public authority”.
Buch retired from her role at SEBI on February 28.
