FIIs should pay full amount upfront if time gap in public offer cut: Bhave

The market regulator said the present process that requires three or four weeks is not acceptable in today’s state of modern infrastructure in the country.

“We want to reduce this. In a few months, we will tell the markets what our roadmap is and how we plan to crunch this time lag between the last date of subscription and listing date. We should be able to achieve this in lesser period of time,” he said.

On the issue of Participatory Notes, he said 190 FIIs and 470 sub-accounts have registered with Sebi since October-end last year when liberal registration policy was announced.

“This is a good progress. We take 15 days to three weeks to register FIIs unless the applications are incomplete (and) where some correspondence is needed,” he said.

Bhave said Sebi did not recognise hedge funds and private equity funds as separate categories. He said there has been an outflow of $3 billion in the first two months of this year, against a net inflow of $17 billion in all of 2007.

“We in India understand that the flow of investments will not always be a one-way traffic. Our systems and our markets can be said to be truly mature when we can handle both flows into the country,” he said.

He said FIIs today contribute approximately 17 per cent of the turnover on India’s stock exchanges in the equity segment, and they represent 28 per cent of the open interest in F&O segment of the NSE, on any given day.

On the stock lending and borrowing mechanism, the market regulator said, “We expect that the parameters for the implementation of the stock lending or borrowing scheme would be announced soon, and a firm date for starting the process on both NSE and BSE would also be announced simultaneously.”