Trial by Fire

Hounded by allegations of conflict of interest in the Adani probe and rising discontent among her own staff, the Sebi chief has much to answer for-and disclose

- M.G. Arun

It's not as if Madhabi Puri Buch has not faced challenges before: a three-and-a-half-decade career in the rapidly evolving world of finance would guarantee that enough came her way. In the late '90s, while working at ICICI Bank, her manager admonished her for being technologically illiterate.

"I was told that unless I made friends with technology, I wouldn't be going anywhere in the firm," she told INDIA TODAY in an interview last November. The message fired her determination to master technology, so much so that in a matter of months, the same boss entrusted her with the responsibility of launching icicidirect.com, one of India's earliest online trading platforms.

But Buch, 58, the first woman to head the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) and its first chief drawn from the private sector, is facing her biggest challenge yet-and from several quarters at once.

First, it was the US short-seller Hindenburg Research which, on August 10, unleashed a string of allegations, accusing Buch and her husband (former Unilever executive Dhaval Buch) of having investments in offshore funds with alleged links to the Adani Group, which Sebi had been investigating for alleged stock price manipulation.

Hindenburg also claimed that Buch influenced policy decisions at Sebi that supported real estate investment trusts (REITs) at a time when Dhaval became an advisor to Blackstone, one of the largest investors and sponsors of REITs in India. Another accusation is that from April 2017 to March 2022, when Buch was a whole-time member of Sebi and later its chairperson, she held a 100 per cent stake in Agora Partners, a Singaporean consultancy firm, in violation of Sebi's code of conduct.

While Buch has denied these allegations, the controversy is unlikely to fade away, with the opposition Congress demanding a probe against her.