SEBI mulls norms for trading permitted stocks on exchanges

Every company, which is listing on the stock exchange, is required to sign a listing agreement with the stock exchange. The companies have the liberty to sign the listing agreement with either one or with both the stock exchanges.

In the case where companies do not list with other stock exchange--and they are listed only in one--the other stock exchange has a right to use the scrip for trading on its stock exchange platform. The Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act (SCRA) provides provision for that that any company, which has a listing agreement with a recognized stock exchange, can be traded in any of the recognized stock exchanges.

Sources say SEBI is now mulling some guidelines for this purpose because there are no such guidelines available except for the SCRA provisions, which allow such trading to happen. There will be a third exchange, which is going to come in. There will not be much listed stocks on the stock exchange. There will be a lot of permitted equity, which will be allowed on those exchanges and that becomes a foremost important task for SEBI because many of these companies do not have a information sharing agreement with exchanges where trading is happening on a permitted category.

Sources say there will be some new guidelines, which will make exchanges sign an information sharing agreement with the companies so that the information, which is shared at one exchange, is automatically shared with other exchange as well. However, that means that a lot of compliance issue is going to go up for many of the companies.

BSE has some 74 companies under permitted category and NSE has some 5 companies. Therefore, it is going to be a tough challenge for the companies who are trading in some of the other exchanges under the permitted category.