MUMBAI: The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on Thursday slipped some welcome changes to regulations involving initial public offers and buybacks in order to simplify language and remove redundancies.
Besides widening the investment limit for anchor investors, the market regulator also reduced the time to announce the price band of an IPO to two days from five earlier and streamlined norms on buyback of securities
“It has been decided to grant additional time for upward revision of open offer price till one working day before the commencement of the tendering period,” SEBI said in a release. The amendments, SEBI said, are primarily aimed at simplifying the language, removing redundant provisions and inconsistencies as well as update references to the Companies Act, 2013. Accordingly, changes would be made to the SEBI (Substantial Acquisition of Shares and Takeovers) Regulations, 2011.
Ajay Tyagi, Chairman, SEBI, said the regulator did not accept the recommendations of a committee headed by former RBI deputy governor R Gandhi, on review of regulations and relevant circulars pertaining to market infrastructure institutions. “We will have enhanced monitoring and supervision of such intermediaries and we will come out with required circulars,” he said.
However, it did include some more of the recommendations made by the Kotak Committee earlier like auditor disclosures and as such, the mandatory disclosures will be effective from April.
“Issuers will benefit from rationalized disclosure requirements such as disclosure requirements for financial statements in IPOs reduced to three years from five years and the concept of materiality introduced for certain disclosures,” said Ramesh Srinivasan, MD & CEO, Kotak Investment Bank.