Held, the impugned Order was passed by the Board in exercise of its power under Section 4(3) read with Section 11 and Section 11B of the said Act and as per Section 11 of the said Act the Board has the power of restraining a person from accessing the securities market or prohibiting any person associated with securities market to buy, sell or deal in securities. Such power is given to the Board under Section 11(4)(b) of the said Act. Therefore, restrain order passed on the respondent strictly speaking was not under Section 11B of the said Act. However, the provisions of Section 11(4)(B) of the said Act also came by way of amendment in 2002. It should, however, be noted that by the time the Board passed the order on 31st March 2004 all the amendments were on the statute. Therefore, the question here is not of retrospective operation of the amendments. Even if the amendments to the said Act are allowed to operate prospectively by the time the order was passed by the Board, it was empowered by the aforesaid amendments to do so. Therefore, without giving any retrospective operation to those provisions, the impugned order can be passed by the Board in as much as the amendments in questions empowered the Board to pass such an order when it passed the order. So, the question that survives is whether the Board could pass the order in respect of allegations which surfaced prior to the coming into effect of those amendments in 1995 and 2002.
