• PAGE ONE
• INDEX
• HOME

Investor fund to begin operations by month-end

Our Bureau

NEW DELHI, April 9

THE rules for the working of the Investor Education & Protection Fund (IE&PF) is to be notified soon, while the fund itself is likely to be operationalised by the end of the month.

Speaking informally to the newspersons here, the Secretary, Department of Company Affairs (DCA), Mr V. Govindarajan, said all decks had been cleared for the functioning of the fund.

Snags had developed in operationlising the fund earlier. Having cleared all the hiccups, the Ministries of Law and Finance were working in close co-ordination for operationalising the fund, he said.

Earlier, the Law Ministry, in consultation with the Finance Ministry and the Comptroller & Auditor General of India (CAG), had decided that the fund, in terms of Section 205 C of the Companies (Amendment) Act, 1999, shall form part of the Consolidated Fu nd of India (CFI) or public accounts fund.

Further, the maintenance of this fund, which is a statutory fund, will be in keeping with the Constitution, with the approval of the CAG. It had also been decided in-principle that the modus operandi of the fund's working regarding receipt and expenditur e had to be worked out in consultation with the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) and the CAG, which will be effectively represented in the proposed fund.

According to the current estimates of the Department of Company Affairs (DCA), the Government has traced out about Rs 500 crore which have remained unclaimed in the corporate sector. The rough estimates by the department shows that the corpus will be mor e than Rs 700 crore.

The bulk of the amount will be invested for creating investor education through multimedia publicity, seminars and conferences, at the smaller cities and towns, he said. Further, the amount will also be utilised to take care of the distressed individual investors.