The Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) has done it again. On 2 June 2022, it issued a brief 9-page order which throws out of the window the very philosophy of disclosure-based regulations that have underpinned all of SEBI’s (Securities and Exchange Board of India’s) actions for three decades.
On 10thApril,
The Times of India published a report to say that major banks, including State Bank of India (SBI), Bank of Baroda, Bank of India and HDFC Bank, had moved the Supreme Court (SC) of India to recall its six-year old judgement of 2015, which had ordered banks to provide certain information about their functioning under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. Banks and their expensive lawyers argued that “account holders may sue them for putting such details (client information) in the public domain” and that the order could be “misused for corporate rivalry” and affect the banking industry as a whole. Let’s examine how correct this claim is.