Simplified Listing Agreement for Debt Securities

SEBI vide its circular SEBI/IMD/BOND/1/2009/11/05 dated May 11, 2009 has come out with a new simplified listing agreement for Debt Securities. This is a part of the SEBI’s continuous efforts to rationalize the disclosure norms for listing of debt issuances. The new listing agreement is based on the following principles.

• Where the equity of an issuer is listed, and such an issuer seeks listing of debt securities (whether by way of a public issue or a private placement), minimal incremental disclosures related to the debt security issuance would be sufficient, since large amount of information is already in public domain and material developments are disclosed under the equity Listing Agreement on a nearly continuous basis. Part A of the Listing Agreement prescribes only incremental disclosures which are relevant for debt securities of such issuers whose equity shares are listed on the Exchange.
• Where the equity of an issuer is not listed, and such an issuer seeks listing of debt securities (whether issued by way of a public issue or a private placement), detailed disclosures, fewer than those made under the equity Listing Agreement, would need to be made. Part B of the Listing agreement is applicable to issuers whose equity shares are not listed on the Exchange, prescribes detailed disclosures.

Copy of the circular is available here.

Discussion Paper on Simplification and Uniformity in the process of weeding out/ rejection of applications in primary market transaction

SEBI has published on its website, a discussion paper containing proposals to simplify and to bring about uniformity in the process of weeding out/ rejection of applications in primary market transactions using PAN. The proposals contained in this paper are placed for public comments for a period of 15 days.

Earlier in 2007, SEBI has stipulated that applicants in public issue should disclose their PAN in the application form, irrespective of the amount for which application/bid is made, failing which the application would be rejected. But different practices were followed by market participants in this regard. Usually the Registrar to the issue carries on the process of identifying rejections, based on the grounds of rejection disclosed in the offer document. The basis of weeding out of multiple applications involves cross checking a number of fields by the Registrar, such as name of the applicant, age, PAN, address of the applicant, DP ID, Client ID, fathers/husband’s name and finally the signatures.

For the purpose of simplifying the weeding out process and to bring about uniformity across procedures adopted in rejection of applications in primary market transactions, the following proposals are being considered by SEBI for implementation:

• The Registrar shall validate PAN, DP ID and Client ID available in the application form with the said data available in the depositaries database. If these data do not match, such application shall be rejected and not be considered for allotment.


• Applications made in public, preferential issue and in Qualified Institutional Placements (QIP) without mentioning PAN or with invalid or incorrect PAN shall be rejected.
  
  A copy of the discussion paper is available here.