SEBI needs access to phone-tap records, says chairman Sinha
27 May 2013
U K Sinha, chairman of the Securities & Exchange Board of India, today clarified that market regulator does not want phone-tapping powers; but merely access to call data records of persons being probed by it for insider trading and other market manipulations.
Sinha's clarification follows a statement by union finance minister P Chidambaram last week that SEBI would be given access to call data records of entities being investigated in specific cases. The finance minister had even then clarified that SEBI would not be allowed to directly tap phone calls.
SEBI call records of entities under its investigation to establish links between two or more parties who might have had conversations among themselves before or after the incidents of insider trading or other manipulative activities in the market, Sinha said in Mumbai today.
"The CDRs [call directory records] can be very useful to establish that two parties have been talking to each other and could be related entities," he said.
CDRs generally list out the number of conversations between two or more entities and are different from phone-tapping, wherein an agency can snoop on or record the telephonic conversations of those suspected to be engaged in some wrongdoings.
Among the agencies that have official phone-tapping powers in India are the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Income Tax Deparment.
"We are not asking for powers to snoop on the conversations between two entities or to do the phone tapping. We are only asking for CDR details of the persons that we are investigating and we want to know about the parties they (the entities under probe) have been interacting with," Sinha told PTI in an interview.
(See: SEBI Act has stayed static since 2002, chairman Sinha tells PM, FM)
