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India’s top finance ministry bureaucrat Tuhin Kanta Pandey has a track record of market-friendly reforms. That will come in handy in his new job overseeing the country’s top regulator.
Pandey previously delivered the sale of India’s largest state-owned airline, a deal that had been mired in red tape for years, and has helped implement sweeping reforms at other state enterprises. His next challenge: bringing a sense of calm to the country’s beleaguered stock market.
Many market participants hope he will start by reducing India’s dizzying number of regulations.
Pandey, a career bureaucrat, succeeds banker-turned-regulator Madhabi Puri Buch, whose term ends on Friday. Buch oversaw a boom period for stocks, including a sharp growth in retail accounts, and implemented some regulatory changes investors welcomed — but she also faced concerns over policy flip-flops, allegations of conflicts of interest and signs of discontent among SEBI staffers.
Pandey, who was picked as India’s finance secretary in September, previously spent five years running the government’s divestment initiatives. That will help him bring a “unique experience” to the market regulator, said Mumbai-based Vikas Gupta, chief investment strategist at OmniScience Capital.
A big transaction like the sale of Air India involves bringing everyone from investors to bankers and the government to the table, an important skillset for a market regulator, Gupta said.
Pandey is likely to be a consensus builder at SEBI, listening to feedback from market participants rather than prescribing ready-made solutions, said Narinder Wadhwa, managing director at SKI Capital Services Ltd.
Keep It Simple
Pandey’s appointment marks a return to India’s legacy of appointing bureaucrats to the helm of its stock market regulator. Buch, the first woman to run SEBI, joined in 2017 after decades as an investment banker and fund manager, getting the top job five years later.
Buch’s three-year tenure included a raft of new regulatory proposals, raising eyebrows among some market participants who say India already struggles with too much red tape. There were as many as 197 discussion papers released during her tenure, a 73% rise from her predecessor’s five-year term, SEBI data compiled by Bloomberg showed.
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