Political row erupts as Sebi chief Madhabi Puri Buch skips Public Accounts Committee meeting

After the meeting was deferred, panel members from BJP protested with Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, accusing PAC chairperson Venugopal of unilateral decisions.

Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) chairperson Madhabi Puri Buch skipped a meeting of Parliament’s public accounts committee (PAC) on Thursday citing “personal exigency”, prompting panel chief and Congress lawmaker KC Venugopal to postpone the sitting.

Madhabi Puri Buch. (PTI)

Soon after the meeting was deferred, panel members from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lodged a protest with Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, accusing PAC chairperson Venugopal of taking unilateral decisions.

“In the first meeting of the committee itself, we decided to have a suo motu subject for review of our regulatory bodies. That is why we called for a review of SEBI this morning... First of all, SEBI chairperson sought an exemption from appearing before the committee which we denied. After that, she confirmed she and her team would be present on this committee. Today at 9.30 am, she [SEBI chief] informed that due to a personal exigency she is not in a position to travel to Delhi. Considering a woman’s request, we thought it better to postpone today’s meeting for another day,” Venugopal told reporters after the meeting was postponed.

To be sure, the panel’s decision to call Puri Buch was not related to this controversy but instead was part of the PAC’s decision to include in its agenda the performance review of regulatory bodies established by acts of Parliament.

Venugopal’s move to summon Puri Buch faced stiff objections from several BJP panel members , who said the decision was guided by partisan politics and that their opinion was not sought.

To be sure, the parliamentary standing committee on finance has also called the Sebi chairperson to discuss the functioning of the capital markets regulator. In the latter half of Thursday, the PAC heard from the department of telecommunications and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) as it continued to conduct a performance review of regulatory bodies.

After the meeting was postponed, BJP members accused Venugopal of not letting them put across their views. “This is very big issue. His [Venugopal’s] words were ‘sou motu’. How did you decide? PAC’s work is to deliberate over CAG (Comptroller & Auditor General of India) report. We have also got information from trusted sources that the CAG has made no mention of Sebi,” BJP lawmaker and former Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters.

“This entire conduct is unparliamentary. The conduct of chairperson in the way he adjourned, did not allow us to speak. And (he) walked out (which) shows he has extraneous political considerations,” he alleged.

“The chairperson has been taking decisions unilaterally. The rules permit for examining regulatory bodies in so far as their accounts are concerned, that is, their income and expenditure are concerned. It does not have the ambit to do an overall performance review of a regulatory body. That function is under the standing committee of that department. The PAC cannot traverse beyond its jurisdiction and trammel upon the jurisdiction of the departmental standing committee,” a BJP member of the PAC told HT after the meeting.

This was communicated to Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla when the BJP members of the PAC, including Nishikant Dubey, Jagdambika Pal, Aparajita Sarangi and Tejasvi Surya, went to meet Birla to complain about Venugopal, who is also a Congress general secretary.

In response to this member’s comments, Venugopal said that during the 15th Lok Sabha, veteran BJP leader Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, who then headed the PAC, had summoned SEBI and tabled a report in the parliament about the regulator.

Dubey had also written to Birla last month against Venugopal, accusing him of raking up “non-existent” issues to defame the Union government and allegedly destabilise the country’s financial structure and economy.

Dubey argued that the CAG had not published any report on the conduct of Sebi chief and this aspect has no linkage to the appropriation accounts of the Government of India. He said it would be “unconstitutional and illegal” to investigate the allegation of conflict of interest of Sebi chief—issues that are “non-existent”.

The controversy around Buch-Puri came days after the joint parliamentary committee looking into the Waqf (Amendment) Bill saw high drama as Trinamool Congress MP Kalyan Banerjee, after getting into an ugly spat with BJP MP Abhijit Gangopadhyay broke a glass bottle, hurt his hand in the process, and allegedly flung it towards chairperson Pal.

After the PAC meeting, Pal, while commenting on the incident with Banerjee, said, “Anyone has the right for debate, deliberations, he can protest also. But there is no place in parliamentary democracy for violence. ... What Kalyan Banerjee, he had not just thrown the bottle to [at] me, he had tried to bulldoze through the parliamentary democracy also.”

Banerjee was suspended for a day and two sittings of the JPC. Before this incident, last week, opposition members had walked out of a meeting after accusing Pal of stymying their voices and not contesting allegedly demeaning remarks made by one of the deponents against Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge.

Members of the JPC from both the ruling party and the opposition deescalated the situation around Banerjee and Gangopadhyay’s spat because there is pressure on them to submit a report, and getting Banerjee suspended for a longer period would have thwarted that as it would have become the sole talking point about the committee, people aware of the matter said.

However, at least one member has sought disciplinary and legal action against Banerjee. Surya, in a letter to Birla that he posted on Twitter on Thursday, said that Banerjee’s conduct warranted “stricter punitive measures” as his behaviour not only breached the decorum of the parliament, but also posed “a threat to the safety of fellow MPs” and “the integrity of the institution”.

One of the members cited above said that the aim of the JPC on the Waqf bill is to submit a report before the next Parliament session, that is, the winter session. The JPC is on track to deliver that report, this person said.