India’s market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, will investigate possible leaks of company earnings in social media chatrooms, its chief Ajay Tyagi said on Friday, according to Reuters.
The Sebi investigation comes after a Reuters report documented at least 12 cases of prescient messages about major Indian companies being posted in private WhatsApp groups. “We will certainly investigate the issue,” Tyagi said. “It is a work in progress.”
The posts with prescient numbers in the WhatsApp groups were circulated hours or days before official company statements. The messages were either lucky guesses or forecasts based on publicly available information. Reuters could not determine where the numbers posted on the WhatsApp groups came from, or whether any of the participants who got the messages traded on their basis.
The messages involved upcoming quarterly results, net profits, revenues and operating margins. They also had information about upcoming bonus share issues and revenue guidance, according to the report.
In 2015, India had toughened insider trading rules and expanded the scope of who constitutes an “insider” to include “anyone in possession of or having access to unpublished price-sensitive information”, regardless of how they came “in possession of or had access to such information”.
Circulating such information can lead to penalties and a jail term of up to 10 years.
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