07 December,2010 06:58 AM IST | | J Dey
The names of Ketan Parekh and his key associate Anand Rathi have returned to haunt the Bombay Stock Exchange.
The names of the stockbrokers are part of a confidential report prepared by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) that indicates rampant manipulation of stocks in the market.
The report has emerged at a time when more than 500 of the estimated 1,000-odd companies have vanished from the list of BSE in the past few years.
u00a0
Investors have lost more than Rs 2,500 crore in the vanishing companies, which have disappeared without leaving a trace about their operations.
When MiD DAY approach-ed the BSE for a comment on the vanishing companies, Hemant Batra, a spokesperson, said "They are not available for comments."
Vanishing act
Some of the companies have vanished without declaring their financial results, project details and even addresses.
u00a0
Investigations have indicated that some of the premium issues too have disappea-red after raising around Rs 5 to 10 crore from the capital market.
And very little has changed in the past 10 years where dabba trading has taken thousands of market players for a ride.
Bear tactics
In 2001, erstwhile BSE president Rathi had quit after his involvement in seeking and disclosing market-sensitive information on the bear-hammering market to his associates.
Phone calls monitored by BSE's surveillance department indicated that a call from Rathi had resulted in stock prices across the board taking a sharp downturn spreading panic among gullible investors.
SEBI forced Rathi to resign as the president of the 135-year-old exchange in the wake of the controversy over the taped conversations where he asked for information on specific stocks from exchange's surveillance department.
There are reasons to suspect there are several loopholes in BSE's surveillance department. The IB's latest report of large-scale rigging is a glaring case in point.
And now, 10 years later, Rathi's name has again figured in connection with raising funds in the market through a private equity route.
Rathi did not respond to MiD DAY's calls or SMSes.
Secured system
BSE's Corporate Communica-tions Rohit Khatau in an official letter claimed the exchange runs its trading systems on highly secured environment and hardware, which has its own propriety-operating database.
Khatau clarified that the SQL injection method or an application with SQL based databases has no relevance to BSE trading systems or website hacking.
