There is hectic activity at the Stock Holding Corporation of India Limited (SHCIL) these days; but none of it involves any effort to nail those involved in the attempt to loot the organisation and scoot with its wholly-owned subsidiary SHCIL Services Limited (SSL), as we had highlighted in our cover story “Loot and Scoot” (MoneyLIFE 5 July 2007). The effort is probably to bury the scam. A few...

The new CMD, Razdan clearly believes that it is time to move on. He called in a couple of journalists to inform them that SHCIL had received a mandate for e-stamping legal documents from the Maharashtra and Delhi governments; and, with 11 other states under its belt, it hopes to get 75% of India’s e-stamping business. Are people forgetting that over Rs30,000-Rs40,000 crore of stamp paper is...

SEBI chairman, M. Damodaran, likes to plan headline-grabbing sound bites at important public meetings, but that strategy is getting rather ragged. At the end of September, Damodaran told Merrill Lynch executives how he had issued a ‘show-cause notice’ to 20 large companies that had failed to meet corporate governance regulations. Calling his action a ‘crackdown’, he claimed that it was...