The International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) announced on August 25, 2026, the implementation of new market abuse regulations that will replace existing SEBI guidelines for the GIFT-IFSC securities market. According to reports from The Economic Times, these regulations are designed to comprehensively combat insider trading and manipulation, employing international language and a unified coding system. The IFSCA (Prohibition of Market Abuse in Securities Markets) Regulations, 2026 (PMASM Regulations) represent an addition to the growing GIFT-IFSC's securities market, creating a self-contained, unified code addressing insider trading and fraudulent, manipulative and unfair trade practices, in place of the extended application of two separate SEBI regulations.
The PMASM Regulations are divided into four chapters addressing different aspects of market abuse prevention. As reported by The Economic Times, Chapter 1 defines key terminology including 'Material non-public information' (MNPI) and equates it with 'unpublished price sensitive information' (UPSI), preserving the SEBI-derived UPSI concept while adopting internationally recognizable terminology. Chapter 2 establishes insider-trading restrictions through Regulation 4, which prohibits communicating or procuring MNPI outside legitimate purposes, and Regulation 5, which prohibits trading while in possession of MNPI. The regulations extend coverage from only companies under the PIT Regulations to entities under the PMASM Regulations.
According to the notification, listed entities must maintain internal controls and a code of conduct addressing MNPI identification, communication restrictions, and periodic review. As reported by The Economic Times, contravention is dealt with under the corresponding provisions of the IFSCA Act, with sanctions under the Regulations themselves being warnings, censure, and suspension or cancellation of registration. For intermediaries, the regulations impose concrete compliance obligations including disclosure timelines of two trading days for designated-person transactions and two working days for onward exchange disclosure, along with regulation 9 institutional-controls requirements. For institutional investors and asset managers, the regulations provide regulation 5(3) defences, the Chinese-wall carve-out for non-individual insiders and the 120-day trading-plan disclosure, giving a narrow, specified route to trade while holding MNPI that investors running both India-linked and IFSC-linked mandates will need to build into compliance systems distinct from their SEBI-regime processes.
The new framework maintains international standards by creating no equivalent dual track or specialist tribunal for enforcement, with enforcement running through IFSCA's administrative powers under the IFSCA Act. As reported by The Economic Times, IFSCA's published enforcement-actions record for 2024–2026 shows a steady stream of orders, warnings, penalties, cancellations or suspensions of registration against intermediaries for various contraventions. However, the public record does not yet establish that IFSCA has brought a market-abuse enforcement action under the new framework, nor does it disclose specific surveillance technology deployed for this purpose. The sharpest structural divergence is enforcement forum, with Hong Kong running parallel civil and criminal tracks, and the UK sitting a civil regime alongside separate criminal offences, while IFSCA creates no equivalent dual track or specialist tribunal, with enforcement primarily through administrative powers.
For institutional investors and asset managers, the regulations provide a narrow, specified route to trade while holding MNPI through regulation 5(3) defences and the Chinese-wall carve-out for non-individual insiders. According to The Economic Times, IFSCA has replaced a borrowed framework with an authored one, adopted internationally recognizable terminology and structure, moved toward unified-instrument models, and embedded itself in the IOSCO information-sharing network. The true measure of the regulations' effectiveness will become evident through future enforcement initiatives and demonstrated surveillance capability, as the coming years of enforcement practice will determine whether IFSCA converts this rulebook into demonstrated supervisory effectiveness. Rules are, on the evidence reviewed, a necessary but not sufficient condition for the market-conduct credibility international investors, exchanges and custodians actually rely on, with the evidence for demonstrated effectiveness being thinner specifically for market abuse enforcement.
