More than half the complaints about portfolio management services filed with SEBI, involve Kotak Securities’PMS

Portfolio Management Services (PMS) could be injurious to your wealth, and it can be especially injurious if you entrust your money to Kotak Securities.

In response to a Right to Information (RTI) query, the Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has said that Kotak PMS offered by Kotak Securities Limited accounts for 50% of the total complaints with regard to poor PMS services.

Rajan Manchanda, the investor who asked for details on the PMS schemes offered by Kotak, received the response from SEBI on 4 February 2011. It said that the regulator had 28 pending complaints about PMS services at the end of January 2011, half of which are complaints pertaining to Kotak group entities.
 
SEBI said it had received 49 complaints about the PMS services provided by Kotak Securities over the past 24 months, and that 35 of these had been resolved. Thirty-seven of the complaints were received in the past 12 months. Fourteen complaints pending involve a sum of Rs4.19 crore.

One of these complaints was against Kotak Mahindra Capital Company and it was resolved a year ago. (This matter is most likely from last year, as the reply is dated 1 February 2010.) On whether the company is functioning or has become defunct, SEBI refrained from giving an answer, saying that this "was in the nature of seeking an opinion from SEBI". It is unclear how a question about whether a company is functioning or not becomes a matter of opinion. Similarly, SEBI said that Kotak Investment Advisors is not registered with the regulator.
 
Mr Manchanda, who has himself been a victim of Kotak PMS asked: "Shouldn't SEBI warn investors (about these complaints) like it did with Sahara?" He also wondered how Kotak received so many awards when there have been serious problems about its services over the past three years. Interestingly, while SEBI has not taken any effective action against Kotak, the institution boasts that no penalty has been levied against it.

This situation is explained quite simply. SEBI chooses to tinker with regulations rather than offer comprehensive information to investors. Performance data on PMS services needs to be reported to a statutory database, which is overseen by the regulator. Instead, SEBI merely requires this information to be put up on the service providers' own database (this too has been enforced only after persistent follow-up by Moneylife) and on their application forms. This is just a beginning in terms of information dissemination and a lot more needs to be done.

A Moneylife survey on investor satisfaction with PMS services, conducted recently, indicated that complaints filed with the regulator do not capture all the complaints regarding PMS losses. In fact, Moneylife has helped mitigate losses to an extent in a couple of cases, where no complaint was filed with the regulator at all.

— Moneylife Digital Team