The Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, will be addressing the board of market regulator SEBI on February 17 in New Delhi. The SEBI meeting will be held to mainly discuss the announcements made in the Union Budget on February 1 and also the Finance Bill, sources in the know told

In her Budget speech, Sitharaman had said that many significant financial market regulations, including the SEBI Act, would be consolidated with other important laws to create a common single code.

It will include consolidation of the provisions of SEBI Act, 1992, Depositories Act, 1996, Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act, 1956 and Government Securities Act, 2007 into a rationalised single Securities Markets Code. It is likely that the FM will brief the SEBI board on the road-map.

Expert panel on cards

In the next few weeks, the government would be announcing the setting up of an expert panel to merge and recreate a new-age securities market framework.

In her Budget, the FM also spoke about making SEBI a regulator for spot bullion exchange platforms. According to sources, a discussion around this is likely on the agenda in the February 17 meet.

India is among the world’s largest traders and importers of bullion. Towards investor protection, the FM proposed to introduce an investor charter as a right for investors in all financial products. A discussion around this will be held and in the coming months SEBI will be framing policies around the budget announcements.

SEBI chairman Ajay Tyagi would be briefing the FM about the measures taken by SEBI against broker defaults and with regard to the overhaul of mutual funds norms.

SEBI is seeking to implement a project on automation of inspection and surveillance of mutual funds. All the mutual fund related data will be ingested in the SEBI database the regulator will use algorithms to generate instances of breaches of regulatory guidelines by mutual funds.

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