Chandrasekhar Bhaskar Bhave, a former Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) chairperson, commenting for the first time on the recent Hindenburg allegations, said that the response should not have come from SEBI or even from its chairperson, Madhabi Puri Buch, but from the Union government i.e. the Ministry of Finance.
Bhave said that since SEBI and its chairperson face serious allegations they cannot really respond and clarify their own situation. It won’t carry conviction or credibility. Instead, Bhave said that the chairperson should have made available to the government details of all her disclosures as well as recusals and the government should then have responded as it thinks fit.
In a 35-minute interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, Bhave was also asked about how SEBI has handled the Hindenburg allegations since they first became public in January 2023. He said if all the assumptions in the public domain about disclosures or non-disclosures and about recusals and non-recusals are correct “it wasn’t handled properly”.
