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Govt sets up panel to curb economic frauds

The central government has set up the Economic Intelligence Council, or EIC, headed by Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha to check and curb economic frauds in the country, it was announced today.

The Reserve Bank of India, or RBI, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, or SEBI, the Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI, the Department of Revenue, and the Department of Company Affairs will also be the members of the council.

Secretary in the Department of Company Affairs P L Sanjeev Reddy said this while inaugurating a two-day 'fraud conference', the first in the country, organised by the India chapter of Association of Certified Fraud Examiners to evolve ways to curb 'white collar crimes' like securities scams, extortion, hawala transactions, cyber-fraud and match-fixing.

He announced that his department, along with the RBI, the SEBI and the Company Law Board, were working out measures to deal with non-banking financial companies, or NBFCs, which have siphoned off larger sums of money from stock exchanges and individual investors.

Reddy said a list of all such defaulting companies would be made known to the people regularly as a measure of standing warning that such companies would be delisted.

The government was also planning to form a new code for corporate governance for reducing frauds by trade, commerce and industry, he informed.

Reddy said his department was working out a caution list of defaulting companies and would put it on the Web site as also on the notice board of the offices of the company registrars all over the country and in the offices of the RBI and SEBI to warn people and investors who were duped by unscrupulous companies in the corporate sector.

He called upon the fraud examiners to help the government in evolving a new code for corporate governance so that with a better degree of legal provisions, discipline by financial institutions and enforcement of various economic regulations, corporate frauds could be curbed, if not eliminated altogether.

The senior government official exuded confidence that the two-day-long conference would come out with a concrete action plan which would be handy for the government to include in its agenda a collective action plan to deal with the menace of all sorts of frauds in the country.

The conference stressed the need to formulate measures and better professional investigation methods to counter the growth of white-collar frauds.

UNI

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