Chartered accountants, the nuts-and-bolts professionals in the world of finance, are scoring brownie points over suave MBA finance graduates as India Inc gets increasingly risk-averse in a post-slowdown environment. Companies are focusing more on risk-compliance than pursuing ambitious targets as they recover from an 18-month economic downturn, paving the way for recruitment of more CAs, perceived to have core competence in financial matters.
Reserve Bank of India on Monday allowed foreign institutional investors to offer domestic and foreign government securities as collateral to stock exchanges for cash segment transactions. According to market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India’s regulations, FIIs are required to post collaterals for their transactions in the cash segment of the market.
SEBI chairman C B Bhave, and IRDA chief J Harinarayan had separate meetings with finance secretary Ashok Chawla on Monday over the ongoing tussle between the two regulators over equity-linked insurance schemes. The differences between the two regulators over administration of the unit-linked insurance products (ULIPs) are likely to be resolved by this evening, IRDA chief Harinarayan indicated after his meeting with Chawla.
Ministry of defence plans to oppose a proposal from the ministry of commerce and industry to allow foreign defence corporations to establish fully-owned defence units in India. The new Consolidated Foreign Direct Investment Policy, effective from April 1, limits FDI in defence units to 26 per cent. But the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion of the commerce ministry is in favour of raising this limit.
A senior official in the finance ministry said the Central Board of Direct Taxes addressed the nine areas of concern in the Code identified by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee. Besides, many other parts would be changed to take care of the concerns of various stakeholders.
Floating-rate home loan borrowers, who often felt they got a raw deal, will now have a reason to cheer. The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) new rules will ensure that they get the full benefit of any reduction in interest rates. In its final guidelines on the base rate — the new benchmark that banks will use to price loans — the regulator has made it clear that any change in the base rate will apply to new as well as old customers. Banks often offered lower rates and even teaser-rate schemes to attract new customers.
Fiscal 2010 turned out to be a bad year for the tinsel town with the earnings of many a Bollywood superstar, including Akshay Kumar, Shahrukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan, taking a plunge as reflected in their advance tax payments. According to the data of advance tax paid by these cine stars, Akshay Kumar made a payment of only Rs 18 crore in FY10 as against Rs 31 crore for 2008-09, a fall of about 42 per cent. He, however, is still the highest tax payer.
The Delhi High Court has directed stock market regulator SEBI to conduct probe against real estate giant DLF for alleged mis-statement in its Red Herring Prospectus while launching its IPO in 2007. The court passed the order after it was alleged by a person that the DLF had intentionally made a false statement that it had no association with Sudipti Estates Pvt Limited, one of its subsidiary companies against which a criminal case was filed for duping him Rs 31 crore.
When a Chartered Accountant is performing a statutory audit, he is acting as an agency of the revenue department. Many times, we have seen that the dealers’/assessee’s assessment has been made on the basis of the auditors’ report. It is very well settled doctrine of the law that in any given case, one person can not be the solicitor for both the parties.
In a piquant situation, insurance regulator Irda on saturday rejected the market regulator Sebi’s ban on life insurance companies from raising funds through unit-linked insurance policies and asked them to do business as usual. Taking Sebi head on in the turf war over who would administer Ulip (unit-linked insurance products) scheme, Irda, in a surprise order, told the 14 affected life insurance companies that it has set aside the Sebi ban.
