India’s government is seeking approval from parliament to reduce its stake in the State Bank of India to 51 percent and allow the nation’s biggest lender to boost capital by selling shares.

The amendment to the State Bank of India Act, first proposed in December 2006, was introduced in the lower house of parliament today. State Bank shares rose as much as 3.3 percent in Mumbai to the highest intraday-trading level since Feb. 1.

MUMBAI: Representatives of offshore financial centres like Cayman Islands, Isle Of Man, Mauritius and British Virgin Islands are going all out to
convince Indian clients to launch their business or investment verticals from these jurisdictions. Corporate advisory businesses in these ‘capital havens’ have begun offering India-centric services to asset management companies (AMCs) and firms intending to raise capital or launch investment vehicles.

In keeping with the spread of sophisticated life styles in the west, the credit cards phenomenon has invaded India and most people have gotten so used to it that they can not live with out it. However, unlike in the west, the dice here in India is totally loaded against the user as the Reserve Bank of India [ Get Quote ] is able to do very little in securing the user, says SS Kumar.

The following are the ways in which card issuing banks try to fleece the card holder:

Late fee

HDFC Chairman Deepak Parekh believes that the law governing the responsibility of independent directors needs to change and that real estate
ET Now
developers should have gone through more pain in the recent slowdown. He thinks that state indifference is the only reason holding back the build-out of the country’s infrastructure and that Mumbai should give up wanting to become an international financial centre. Mr Parekh spoke to ET NOW’s Banking Editor George Cherian on the still untapped potential of the mortgages market in India and his vision for the HDFC group. Excerpts:

Swiss banks may have turned over client details to the US, but they have said India is not welcome there on a name-fishing expedition.

"Swiss law and even OECD's Model Tax Convention do not permit fishing expeditions, in other words, the indiscriminate trawling through bank accounts in the hope of finding something interesting.

"This means that India cannot simply throw its telephone book at Switzerland and ask if any of these people have a bank account here," a top official at Swiss Bankers Association told PTI from Basel.