Committed to ensuring market integrity; measures in place to address excess volatility: Sebi on Adani crisis

New Delhi: Amid a raging controversy over a meltdown in Adani group stocks, regulator Sebi on Saturday said it is committed to ensuring the stock market’s integrity and all necessary surveillance measures are in place to address any excessive volatility in individual shares.

Without naming the Adani group specifically, the capital markets watchdog said in a statement that unusual price movement in the stocks of a business conglomerate has been observed in the past week.

Officials confirmed that the statement has been issued in the wake of the Adani matter only.

”As part of its mandate, Sebi seeks to maintain orderly and efficient functioning of the market and has put in place a set of well-defined, publicly available surveillance measures (including the ASM framework) to address excessive volatility in specific stocks.

”This mechanism gets automatically triggered under certain conditions of price volatility in any stock,” the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) said.

Stock exchanges BSE and NSE have put three Adani group companies — Adani Enterprises, Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone and Ambuja Cements — under their short-term additional surveillance measure (ASM), which basically means that intra-day trading would require a 100 per cent upfront margin and is aimed at curbing speculation and short-selling in these stocks.

Sebi further said that in all specific entity-related matters, if any information comes to its notice, then, as per extant policies, the same is examined and after due examination, appropriate action is taken.

”Sebi has consistently followed this approach on entity-level issues and would continue to do so in future as well,” it added.