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

Amid a raging controversy over a meltdown in Adani Group stocks, the regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (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 issue 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," SEBI said.

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

SEBI also 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.