The Government will soon give market regulator SEBI the powers to get telephone call data records (CDRs) of entities under its investigation in cases of insider trading, money laundering and other market manipulations.
SEBI will be given the powers to get CDRs, access to emails and SMSes through the amendments in the Indian Telegraph Rules, 1951, which is being worked out jointly by the Ministries of Home and Telecom.
The move to give SEBI the powers getting CDRs came following a request of the market regulator as well as the Ministry of Finance, official sources said today. SEBI’s counterparts in US and UK are enjoying the access to communication facilities to counter money laundering and insider trading.
“We are not asking for powers to snoop on the conversations between two entities or to do phone-tapping. We are only asking for CDR details of the persons that we are investigating and we want to know about the parties they (the entities under probe) have been interacting with,” said UK Sinha, SEBI Chairman earlier, adding that it did not want tapping powers.