Advertisement standards for fund management products require communications to be accurate, fair, clear, complete and concise. Advertisements must not be false, misleading, biased or deceptive, or include assumptions, projections, testimonials or rankings. They must not obscure significant statements, exploit investor inexperience, use exaggerated slogans, or adopt language inconsistent with the product's nature, risks and return profile. Information must be timely and consistent with disclosures in the Scheme Documents.

GST refund claims must be examined and disposed of within prescribed statutory timelines and applicable departmental guidelines. Procedures for refund processing, sanction and grievance redressal for pending claims remain applicable. Zonal Incharges and Ward Officers must personally monitor refund pendency and ensure compliance within their jurisdictions. Any procedural deviation or undue delay in processing refund claims may invite appropriate action.

Schedule IV assigns Investment Trust responsibilities to trustees, investment managers, project managers, sponsors, valuers and auditors. Trustees hold assets for unit holders, supervise key managers, protect subscription monies, oversee unitholder voting and manage replacement of investment and project managers. Investment managers make investment decisions, ensure title, insurance, disclosures, reporting, annual audit and segregation of activities. Project managers operate and complete projects. Sponsors establish the trust, transfer relevant assets or interests and meet holding safeguards. Valuers must act independently and avoid conflicts, while auditors must provide a true and fair audit with access to records and information.

Fund management entities must ensure compliant, diligent and investor-focused scheme management, including prescribed valuation and publication, fair investor disclosures, ring-fenced scheme assets and accounts, ethical conduct, AML/CFT compliance, and appropriate internal approvals. Fiduciaries must oversee scheme operations, service providers, associate transactions, net worth, fund property and required investor approvals or disclosures. Principal officers, fund managers and compliance officers must maintain regulatory compliance, manage conflicts, address investor grievances and report non-compliance. Portfolio managers must protect client interests, provide accurate risk information and avoid conflicted or misleading practices.

Net worth requirements under Schedule II of the International Financial Services Centres Authority (Fund Management) Regulations, 2025 prescribe minimum thresholds for fund management entities by category. An Authorised FME must maintain USD 75,000; a Registered FME operating on a non-retail basis must maintain USD 500,000; and a Registered FME operating on a retail basis must maintain USD 1,000,000.

Registration applications for fund management activities in an IFSC must be filed through SWIT with declarations of complete and true information, conformity of proposed activities with the object clause, and fitness and propriety of relevant persons. Applicants must notify material changes, undertake core investment, portfolio management and grievance-handling activities from the IFSC, and base required key management personnel there. Branch applicants must ringfence branch operations. Registration entails ongoing compliance with applicable legal and operational requirements and furnishing further information when sought.

Venture Capital schemes may co-invest in permissible investments through an Authority-framework special purpose vehicle or a segregated portfolio issuing a separate class of units. Segregated portfolio investments cannot receive terms more favourable than the common portfolio, and their creation must be disclosed in the placement memorandum. A co-investment special purpose vehicle may undertake leverage if the placement memorandum discloses it.

FME or its associate must contribute at least 2.5% of a Venture Capital scheme corpus or USD 750,000, whichever is lower, generally subject to a 10% corpus ceiling. The contribution is exempt for relocated schemes and may be waived through investor approval, accredited-investor participation, or specified passive fund-of-funds arrangements. It must be made proportionately within 45 days and maintained continuously, subject to possible extension. Specified foreign-resident and Indian-resident-linked arrangements may exceed the general ceiling if their prescribed investment and contribution conditions are met.

The Fund Management Entity must compute the NAV of each Venture Capital Scheme at least annually from the financial year in which investment activities commence, excluding investments made under the second proviso to regulation 22(1). NAV calculation procedures and methodology must be fully documented, regularly verified, and amended where required.

Regulation 26 requires the FME and fiduciaries to comply with Sixth Schedule investment valuation norms. Scheme assets must be independently valued for NAV computation and disclosure to investors by an eligible service provider. This requirement is inapplicable to investments in regulated schemes in IFSC, India, or foreign jurisdictions that are valued by an independent entity, whether the investment is made directly or through a manager.

Borrowing and leverage by Venture Capital Schemes are permitted only where the placement memorandum discloses the maximum leverage and calculation methodology. Leverage must comply with those disclosures, and any deviation requires consent of investors holding at least two-thirds in value. A Fund Management Entity proposing to employ leverage must maintain a comprehensive risk-management framework appropriate to the scheme's size, complexity and risk profile.

Venture Capital Scheme placement memoranda must disclose investment objectives, targeted investors, corpus, strategy, methodology, tenure, fees, expenses, risk-management practices, and relevant FME and scheme details. The FME must provide annual Net Asset Value and portfolio disclosures from the financial year investment activities commence, subject to the specified exclusion for certain investments. Portfolio disclosure is due within one month after each financial year ends. Material information identified by the FME or fiduciaries must be communicated immediately.

Venture Capital schemes are subject to corpus limits and must deploy at least 80 per cent of their corpus in eligible Investee Companies or qualifying schemes. Follow-on investment in older Investee Companies is permitted only under specified conditions, including consistency with the scheme's stated strategy, exclusion of certain investors from later rounds, and preservation of the scheme's fully diluted beneficial-interest level. Related-party investments and securities transactions generally require investor approval, subject to a disclosed fund of funds exception. Differential distribution rights through senior, junior or subordinate units must follow the applicable framework.

Venture Capital scheme investments are confined to specified securities, debt, money-market instruments, securitised debt, limited liability partnerships and other specified financial products or assets. Investments in units of other Venture Capital schemes, retail schemes, restricted schemes or alternative investment funds require placement memorandum disclosure. Pending deployment, monies may be placed in specified liquid investments. Contributor monies received before the first close must be invested only in permissible instruments that preserve capital and provide adequate liquidity, consistently with disclosed investment objectives and placement memorandum terms.

Venture Capital schemes must operate solely as close-ended schemes, with the amount proposed to be raised and a minimum three-year tenure disclosed in the placement memorandum. A scheme may be constituted as a company, limited liability partnership, or trust. Tenure extensions require investor approval, and extensions beyond two years require express consent from willing investors and an exit opportunity for dissenting investors.

Venture Capital Schemes are limited to fifty investors and permit investment by persons meeting the prescribed minimum threshold or by Accredited Investors. Employees, directors and designated partners of the Fund Management Entity may invest subject to a reduced threshold, while Accredited Investors are exempt from minimum investment requirements. Joint investors must each meet the applicable minimum contribution, with specified family relationships permitted to satisfy the general threshold on an aggregate basis. Registered Fund Management Entities may use restricted schemes to target more investors or accept lower application sizes.

Section 98(2) of the GST framework bars admission of an advance-ruling application where identical questions are already pending or decided in proceedings concerning the applicant. A show-cause notice and investigation addressing service classification, applicable tax treatment and input tax credit constitute parallel statutory proceedings. The bar may apply even where those proceedings arise after the application was filed, because a merits determination cannot continue once the same issues are under adjudication. Disclosure of such material developments is integral to assessing the application's maintainability.

A Fund Management Entity may launch Venture Capital schemes by private placement after filing a placement memorandum and the applicable fee. Green-channel filing permits investor subscriptions upon communication that the memorandum has been taken on record, which is treated as a Certificate of Registration for Income Tax Act purposes. The memorandum remains valid for twelve months, subject to successive six-month extensions where the minimum corpus is not achieved. Material changes must be immediately reported to the Authority.

Venture Capital Schemes must be filed with the Authority as a venture capital fund under the Category I Alternative Investment Fund framework. Such a filed scheme may be construed as a venture capital fund for purposes of the Income Tax Act, the Foreign Exchange Management Act, and related statutory instruments.

A Fund Management Entity may launch schemes but must appoint fiduciaries before filing the scheme document. The required fiduciaries are directors for a company, designated partners for a limited liability partnership, and trustees for a trust. Every fiduciary must meet fit and proper requirements. Appointment of a fiduciary for a retail scheme requires prior approval, and all fiduciaries must comply with the applicable Code of Conduct and obligations.