India fines Reliance for not timely disclosing agreement with Facebook in 2020
MUMBAI:
India’s market regulator on Monday fined Reliance Industries and two of its compliance officials for breaching fair disclosure standards in Facebook’s $5.7 billion investment in the application. your digital location in 2020.
In April 2020, Meta’s Facebook invested $5.7 billion in Reliance’s Jio Platform, which aims to enable WhatsApp to provide payments services to millions of small businesses. The deal has helped billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance ease his debt burden.
The Securities and Exchange Commission of India (SEBI) said Reliance did not disclose the deal even after reports in March 2020 published price-sensitive details about the impending investment. caused their shares to spike.
Reliance did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside of regular business hours.
“When the bits (unpublished price-sensitive information) then become selective, the company abdicates the responsibility of verifying and cleaning up the unverified information that is floating,” SEBI said. in his order by the end of Monday.
SEBI said it was “responsible” to Reliance to provide “its own clarification” when it became aware of the “selective availability” of the information.
The regulator imposed a penalty of 3 million Indian rupees on Reliance and two compliance officers.
(1 dollar = 77,8780 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Abhirup Roy; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
