False disclosures give false sense of information which distorts reality: SEBI chief

To protect investors from cyber frauds and market manipulators, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is planning to put in place robust system in coordination with investigative agencies which will go live soon. The regulator is also working to put in place a specific system wherein when investors are putting money through UPI, it will only go to the registered bank accounts thereby preventing fraud, SEBI Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey said in an exclusive interview with The Hindu. Edited excerpts: 

At least from the compliance point of view there was a closure for my predecessor, because these were personal allegations. But you are right in saying that the chairperson represents an institution, so I would always feel that everyone in the institution right from the chairperson down to a single officer who is working with SEBI is above board. From the institutional perspective our effort should be always there.

We want to make it very clear that being a market regulator we are responsible for market integrity. We want people to work with integrity. All investors should be rightly be placed to the extent possible, on an equal footing and no body must be trading based on unpublished price sensitive information.  

When one can make more money than others [through the price sensitive information] it would spoil the integrity of the market and that was the a very fundamental principle. We have people who are trying to do the pump and dump kind of operations. That’s an impious behavior. Recently we had passed an order on spoofing and we found that the people are spoofing, giving a dodge, so there are different kinds of market manipulations, some are standardised. People are quite creative and innovative also to keep on creating some of the other manipulations which I think it would be our effort to curb it by investing both in terms of human resources and technology. Combined with our intent, we intend to really see that the surveillance and enforcement continues to be on our radar always.

Yes, I think our efforts should always be to do that. Sometimes it may be possible, sometimes it may not be. I think there are many players including board of directors, independent directors, and auditors. All of these things are there to see that that things do not come to that level because after all, we cannot be in every boardroom. Disclosures are there. So false disclosures have to be caught. Auditors have to see what’s going on. Independent directors also see the going on but still some egregious behavior comes and then it ends up in that situation.

I would say it is not a general phenomena. After all, you build businesses and the businesses might go wrong also sometimes, risk that equity holders shareholders always take and is the nature of the market but you have to have an honest intention. The intent is very important. But fraud and falsification are unacceptable. Particularly in a market situation where we have many rules and regulations, many more players. There I think, sometimes you have to come in very hard. In case of IndusInd, we came out with an interim order.

Normally we would have gone for a show cause. But there are certain things which need to be prevented because  time is of essence, market is always playing and the investigations do take time. We are able to at least prevent the things. In many cases, we would like to give an opportunity to the person and then come to a final conclusion like in the case of Gensol. That had to be done because it was discovered that there was so much of lenders’ money was getting diverted. In fact, the lenders should have been more circumspect. This is a role that the company should play. So I think when they fail we have to do that. It is something that we don’t feel happy about but we have to do it.  

 Regulation is only the first part of dealing with wrongdoings. The second part is prevention, third is corrective action when finally someone doesn’t listen. That’s the nature of human behavior. You can deter a large number of people through regulations, but there will be some people who would be careless enough not to bother about the regulation.  You can just make things more complicated for the good people. Regulation is there and if people violate we punish them. 

I never said deregulate. I said optimum regulation. To say that you put more regulation then you can do better is not the way to do that. Effectiveness of regulation is important. If you want to hit where the high risk is, you do not have to get into micro-regulation. We are not able to have effective regulation or effective compliance because if you have too much of it, you can’t focus on the riskier part of it. We can simplify but still be very stringent on something where it actually matters a lot. 

 I think my take is that context is important. Financial capital market development is the essence of growth. If the companies are not able to raise money, then how are they able to invest ? So intermediation is important. Suppose the real economy is faltering and you are simply talking. Then that means there may be a bubble, but real economy fundamentally must carry on in order for that to give a credible fundamental based on which the growth should come and fully agree with him. 

 A lot of it is the temporary sentiment and the moment the sentiment is corrected, it just picks up again. So there is no way we can intervene in those situations and secondly, regulators’ job is to provide the market infrastructure. We will develop the capital market and we develop through instruments which are properly regulated.  

 The point is that we have got literally millions of small enterprises. They are family owned, mostly private, limited or proprietorships, and others. Some have got potential, some are big, but they’re still unlisted, so it is an opportunity. So they should come to the capital market and  raise money and they can graduate. We will not like to just stereotype and make a sweeping statement at the same time. But we don’t have tolerance for false disclosures. We have relatively done a little bit of a tightening  to weed out  completely loss making firms. It’s not that every investor should put money just because somebody is offering IPO. We take a lot of effort keeping the investor aware of responsible investing.

However, there could be some egregious cases as well. We are watching and analyzing to determine the extent of deviant behavior. People should be able to disclose; good or bad.  This false disclosures give a false sense of information to the people, which actually distorts the reality. Therefore, we are also working out a system to verify the claims of a listed company through the exchanges. In that case, that information can very quickly come in loud and we can catch them at that place. So this is the system which we are bringing. We have already told the exchanges and they are working how to make it happen. 

We have to constantly watch it. I would say that complacency is not the place for the regulators. Because you never know what is a new risk. So we have to constantly see how upgrade ourselves and fortunately we also have a lot of young force joining. We are inducting technically savvy, engineers and chartered accountants. And so we really want to encourage them to develop tools and effectively use technology to analyze large data. If you are able to do data analytics of a larger scale, you are able to get alerts from a larger data sets and then from alerts you can do further research. So it’s a painstaking job, but then it’s worth doing that way because the more the data the more we have to have tools to handle it. 

 It is not a question of a personality. SEBI is a Parliamentary institution and Parliament has given us three types of mandates; investor protection, development of markets and regulation of markets. Therefore, it is not bad to know that we are able to maintain market integrity. People will trust a market when you say that we are able to give a fair regulation. So if my job is to only create fear, then do I suppress the economic activity? That is not the kind of an approach that we should have.  We  write fair regulations and we get them implemented. We see that these are implemented and that is dynamic process.  

 There are no concerns. I would say that India is quite a resilient market and our market system is fairly robust. World recognises that.  So instead of becoming complacent, we have to constantly evolve. We have got a nice moment in history with demographic dividend, democracy, demand and talent. 

We are not really saying that we are overly dependent on foreigners. We have our own domestic money coming in as people have faith in the market. But at the same time we should understand the cyber risks. That is one of our very big focus; awareness building.  We are working with platforms to see that only whitelisted apps will be there, others will be pulled down from the play stores. We are working to see that there is a system whereby when you are putting money through UPI, we will have a specific UPI system in built  which will only go to the registered bank accounts. We will just try and create all those things to ensure people do not lose the money.

We are also trying to squeeze business plan of finfluencers out. We have taken down 70,000 finfluencers and we are taking down an average of 5,000 of them every month. We are also squeezing their business model as no regulated entity of SEBI can give advertisement to someone who is not registered in this debate.  I would say that we will do much more, much wider thinking of awareness building through everyone coming together and also bringing other agencies, the state police and, the cyber crime police, the ED and CBI. We are trying to build much more for the investment side and stock side on these crimes. 

We really want to have a massive kind of a plan which will actually penetrate to everyone which includes some simple messages where it can reach down and we are able to say that at least come to the market safely. It is tougher to bring awareness on allocation of portfolio. People are just losing money in F&O.  They can save and invest. That’s how people used to. It’s not a grow rich kind of a thing overnight. It never works. It’s a gambling behavior. In a gambling [the] den house always wins. 

 We are using it. In fact, without artificial intelligence it would not be possible to exactly pinpoint which are the influencers that need to be taken down.

 First of all, the protests happened during my predecessor’s time. I would not like to comment. Now the conflict of interest issue is a very important. In our case, the conflict of interest issue for employees was emanating from the ESR and I mean ESR will have to deal with it and for board members and the chairperson it was from a code of conduct which was came in 2008. They were in different times. They are appointed by the government through the appointment committee so therefore, these were two different things and they are looking at both.  They’re free to interact with anyone. They’re an independent committee formed by SEBI but not reporting to SEBI. 

 I would say that we are trying to bring it together in a more cohesive manner to a SEBI driven strategy but ownership has been taken by other organisations too. The brokers, the market infrastructure institution, the market intermediaries, SEBI and NISM should be able to really work out a more comprehensive awareness campaign together. We are still at concept stage. We have actually done an investor survey which will be out by July and this will help assess the deficiencies and help us formulate the campaign. 

 Yeah, it’s very important.  We are doing it already, but I think we have to further upgrade in terms of sharing of information. Even in cyber crimes affecting investing, we are going to plan in a big way along with various state agencies. So today we have the I4C and the national level and 1930 as a as a single line national line in order to report that the people will do it. But I still think lot of guidance is needed with respect to the cyber crime police as  to how to really go about things quickly in matters which are relating to investment crimes. We also want to give clear alternatives that are safe pipelines. So if we are able to make the people adopt to that, then there will be a very little chance of putting money in wrong account. 

I think it is for you to judge my leadership, I can’t judge my own leadership.