- (1.) All these appeals have been filed under the provisions of Section 15-Z of the Securities and Exchange Board of India Act, 1992 (hereinafter referred to as 'the Act') challenging the impugned order dated 30th December, 2009, passed by The Securities Appellate Tribunal, Mumbai (hereinafter referred as "SAT") in Appeal Nos. 16 to 20 of 2009, whereby the SAT has allowed the appeals filed by the respondents herein and set aside the orders dated 31st December, 2008 passed by the Whole Time Member and the Adjudicating Officer, SEBI.
(2.) These are the cases which reflect the manner of getting excessive number of shares in an irregular manner, which would adversely affect Retail Individual Investors, who are the persons with relatively less means and who desire to invest their hard earned money into shares of companies, whereby they also make an effort to participate in the progress of our economy. So as to see that the Stock Exchanges of the country and the persons connected therewith do not indulge themselves into illegalities or irregularities, the Act has been enacted and the functionaries under the Act have to see that no financial scams take place in the matters relating to issue or transfer of shares, management of Stock Exchange etc. One of the important duties of the functionaries under the Act is to see that when there is an Initial Public Offerings (IPO), the shares are offered to public at large in a particular manner so that even small investors {who have been referred to hereinafter as 'Retail Individual Investors' (RII)}, also get fairly good chance to purchase shares of newly floated companies or shares of existing companies, as and when they are offered to the public at large.
(3.) As we are concerned with issue of shares in the nature of IPO (there is initial offering made by Jet Airways Limited and Infrastructure Development Finance Company Limited), without referring to much details about the transactions of sale or purchase of each company, we have referred to the nature of the transactions in general terms. When shares of the aforestated companies were offered to the public at large, the issue of shares in relation to both the companies had been over subscribed.;