Supreme Court directs SAT to hear NSEL’s plea against ‘Not fit and proper’ brokers

The Supreme Court has acceded to the plea of scam hit National Spot Exchange Ltd (NSEL) seeking direction to the Securities and Appellate Tribunal ( SAT) for hearing its intervention in the “Not fit and proper” appeal case filed by some top notch commodity brokers.

The apex court rejected the opposition put up by senior advocate and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram on behalf of brokers and directed SAT to allow NSEL, which was involved in a ₹5,600 crore payment crisis, to present its intervention in the brokers ‘not fit and proper’ appeal case.

It may be recalled that the NSEL had knocked the doors of the apex court in December 2019 after the SAT on technical grounds of delay declined to entertain its intervention in the commodity brokers appeal against the “not fit and proper” order passed by SEBI.

The Supreme Court has now set aside the SAT order and condoned the delay, stating that the Appellate Tribunal should have condoned the delay having allowed the appellant (NSEL) to withdraw its appeals with liberty to file fresh appeals.

SEBI had in February 2019 declared the commodity arms of leading brokerage houses as “ not fit and proper” for their role in the NSEL scam. The firms that were declared “unfit” by the regulator were commodity arms of Anand Rathi, Motilal Oswal, India Infoline, Geofin and Philip Capital.