In a circular put out on its website, Sebi said: “It has been decided to amend Clause 49 of the equity listing agreement requiring the issuer company to place the monitoring report filed with it before its audit committee.”  The audit committee will review the reports and the statement indicating material deviations in the utilisation of issue proceeds and make appropriate recommendations to the board of the company.

Every issuer company will also be required to inform the material deviations in the utilisation of issue proceeds to the stock exchange and shall also make the adverse comments of audit committee/monitoring agency public  through advertisement in newspapers. 

Further, Sebi has introduced Clause 52 in the equity listing agreement, requiring listed companies to file information with the exchange only through the Corporate Filing and Dissemination System (CFDS). “Listed companies shall, in a phased manner, be required to file information with the stock exchange only through CFDS,” the circular said. 

Common platform
Accordingly, 100 companies have been shortlisted by BSE and NSE to make their submissions through CFDS starting January 1, 2008.

CFDS is the new portal put in place jointly by BSE and NSE and offers a XBRL-enabled common platform for listed companies to file such information, statements and reports as may be specified by BSE and NSE. It may be recalled that Sebi had earlier introduced a clause in the equity listing agreement, mandating certain corporate information through the Electronic data information Filing and Retrieval (EDIFAR) system hosted by National Informatics Centre on behalf of Sebi. EDIFAR will gradually be phased out and will be replaced by CFDS.

“Over period, other modes of sending public information to stock exchanges for compliance with clauses of equity listing agreement shall be dispensed with including filing through EDIFAR. Companies filing through CFDS are not required to make filing through EDIFAR,” the release said.