The nearly $1 billion payment crisis at the unregulated National Spot Exchange Ltd is possibly the biggest scandal in the Indian commodity markets of this decade spawned by the combination of a lackadaisical regulatory regime, greedy promoters and easily pliable bureaucrats and politicians. The NSEL payment scandal is a classic case of the failure of regulation and supervision of Indian commodity markets, argue the authors.

Surprisingly, the NSEL has been functioning as an unregulated commodity exchange for the past many…