During the calendar year up to October 9, foreign institutional investors have lent shares of 224 companies, according to latest data released by the Securities and Exchange Board of India on Friday.
According to the data, the maximum amount of lending of shares by FIIs took place in case of ICICI Bank where over 12.71 million shares were lent by FIIs outside Sebi's jurisdiction.
The companies that saw significant FII lending overseas included NTPC (8.92 million), Tata Steel (8.87 million shares), Reliance Petroleum (7.32 million), ITC (5.07 million), HDIL, Indiabulls and Idea Cellular (over 4 million each), Suzlon (3.19 million), Reliance industries (2.15 million) and Unitech (1.42 million). Most of the 224 stocks are present in the futures and options segment.
If one calculates short-selling based on Friday's closing price, shares worth nearly Rs 5,000 crore (Rs 50 billion) were lent overseas. Market players, however, say the short-selling amount could be up to seven times higher as share prices have declined by over 70 per cent on an average. The amount could be $5-7 billion, they estimated.
FIIs have been lending stocks overseas, purchased through participatory notes (P-notes), since October 2007. Sebi had imposed a ban on issuing P-notes last year as government agencies felt that the instrument lacked transparency. However, the ban was lifted last month.
Following this, Sebi recently barred FIIs from carrying on with overseas lending activity as short-selling through stocks borrowed abroad, at times without the knowledge of the P-note holders, was seen as putting pressure on equity markets.
Apart from this, stocks of over Rs 1,000 crore (Rs 10 billion) were short sold in the domestic market between October 10 and 17, bringing down the benchmark indices by nearly 15 per cent.