Sebi seeks more details from FIIs

Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) will have to provide more details of their activities in Indian equity markets to the capital markets regulator from April.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) on Monday announced revised reporting formats for FIIs on their offshore derivatives instruments (ODIs), which include participatory notes (PNs).

ODIs have Indian equity or debt as underlying securities and are issued by registered FIIs or sub-accounts to clients abroad.

The FIIs issuing such instruments would have to give seven detailed reports regarding their underlying trade activity for every month, with a six-month lag. Starting April 2011, reports providing details of ODI/PN activity for the month should be filed before October 10. This is apart from the monthly summary report FIIs have to file on the seventh of every month, for the previous month.

The reports Sebi has sought for any trading in the Indian market include details of ODI/PN activity and trades where the type of underlying Indian security is equity, debt and derivatives. Besides, it wants details of assets under management where the underlying Indian security is equity, debt and derivatives.

Further, the threshold for reporting of indices such as MSCI World and MSCI EM Asia (which are non-proprietary indices) would be 20 per cent. That is, any index in which the proportion of Indian shares by value is less than 20 per cent need not be reported, even if such exposure is hedged onshore. However, customs baskets would continue to be reportable if hedged onshore, regardless of the percentage of the Indian component.

Sebi said these reports be filed only by the compliance officers of the FIIs, in a password-secured Excel format, via e-mail.

As of December 2010, the total value of PNs based on equity and debt, including those on derivatives, stood at Rs 1,75,584 crore, according to Sebi data. This constituted 15.1 per cent assets under the custody of FIIs.