TEF studies how global companies operating in India characterise intercompany payments, disclose group structures and conduct themselves before regulatory authorities — and publishes its findings in the public interest.
We study public regulatory records, company disclosures and adjudication orders and publish our findings.
We engage with companies, regulators and financial institutions on governance and compliance integrity.
We support the legitimate interests and professional integrity of trade intermediaries in regulated sectors.
Where research warrants it, we make representations to competent authorities — always in accordance with law.
TEF operates as a research institution first — publishing analysis grounded in public records — and as an institutional participant in regulatory and governance processes where the research warrants it.
Systematic analysis of public adjudication records cross-referenced against company disclosures — identifying where characterisations made before Indian authorities are inconsistent with the same group's own public statements.
Where research identifies governance concerns, TEF engages with companies directly — requesting internal review before any regulatory escalation. Company engagement is always the first step.
Supporting Custom House Agents, freight forwarders and trade professionals whose professional integrity or livelihood is affected by corporate misconduct — a core registered object of TEF.
Research reports, policy briefs, governance assessments and compliance notes — published for regulators, financial institutions, trade professionals and the wider public.
Specific areas where the interface between intercompany arrangements, customs characterisations and public disclosures raises governance questions of public interest.
How global companies characterise franchise fees, royalties and management charges for customs assessable value — and whether those characterisations are consistent with the group's own public functional disclosures.
Core ProgrammeIdentifying where a company's characterisation of group functions before Indian customs or tax authorities appears inconsistent with the same group's public descriptions of its own structure and entity roles.
Core ProgrammeWhether material facts, agreements and group arrangements were fully and accurately disclosed to Indian customs authorities during Special Valuation Branch review.
Active ResearchCases where the same intercompany payment is characterised differently for transfer pricing versus customs valuation — a risk area that has attracted international regulatory scrutiny.
Active ResearchCases where licensed CHAs and trade professionals face regulatory proceedings in circumstances where the underlying non-compliance originated with the corporate principal, not the professional.
Active ResearchMaterial discrepancies between ESG commitments and BRSR disclosures made by listed entities and independently verifiable compliance data from regulatory records and databases.
Active ResearchEverything TEF analyses is already in the public domain. Our founders' decades of CHA practice give them the professional fluency to read what others overlook.
Customs adjudication orders are public documents. They record positions companies took before authorities — often reproducing the company's own group structure descriptions within the same record.
Annual reports, BRSR filings, investor presentations and group structure descriptions are public. We read what the company tells the public about how it is organised and how its entities function.
Where the position recorded before an authority cannot be reconciled with the group's own public functional descriptions, that gap is the governance concern — documented, sourced, ready for institutional engagement.
TEF's first step is always a governance review request to the company — requesting internal verification of facts and controls. This is a governance question, not a legal allegation.
Where a company's response is inadequate or absent, TEF submits documented research findings to relevant statutory authorities, financial institutions or courts — always in accordance with law.
TEF does not rely on leaked documents, confidential information or insider disclosures. Every finding is based on what is already publicly available.
"These characterisation patterns emerged when India's trade opened in the 1990s. We were practising then. We read what was recorded — and we read what the same companies said about themselves elsewhere."
This means TEF's analysis cannot be challenged on grounds of confidentiality breach or misuse of insider information. The source is always a public document.
All TEF research and submissions are undertaken in good faith, based on information reasonably believed to be accurate, and solely in furtherance of TEF's registered public interest objects — as recorded in Trade Ethics Forum's Memorandum of Association filed with the Registrar of Companies under the Companies Act, 2013.
Regulatory and institutional engagement is the outcome of research — not the starting point. TEF follows a defined sequence: company first, then regulatory submission where necessary, then judicial or financial escalation where warranted.
TEF goes to the company before going to any authority. A governance review request is always the first step — giving the company the opportunity to verify facts and self-correct. Only where the response is inadequate does TEF escalate externally. This produces a documented record of prior notice that strengthens any subsequent regulatory or judicial engagement.
A structured letter to company leadership — board, legal or compliance — identifying the governance concern and requesting internal review of factual accuracy, sign-off controls and oversight standards. This is not a legal notice. It is a governance inquiry.
Documented representations to statutory authorities responsible for the relevant compliance domain — based entirely on public records and in furtherance of TEF's registered objects. The prior governance letter provides context and evidences good faith process.
Governance risk memoranda to lenders, investors and credit agencies, or PIL filings and writ petitions before courts — where the matter is of sufficient public interest and regulatory action alone has proven insufficient.
TEF is inviting distinguished professionals in law, trade, corporate governance, public policy and finance to serve as founding Advisory Council members in an honorary, non-executive capacity.
"Independent institutional oversight of trade conduct and governance in India is not a luxury. It is the missing layer between the regulator and the regulated."
Expert institutional oversight substantiates public interest standing under Articles 32 and 226.
Institutionally reviewed findings carry greater weight before DRI, SEBI and SFIO.
Institutionally vetted research is significantly harder for corporates to characterise as motivated.
TEF is a Section 8 company and eligible recipient of CSR contributions. Companies with CSR obligations may direct funds to TEF's governance research and public interest activities.
Trade Ethics Forum was established by customs broking practitioners with over three decades of experience in Indian trade, customs and regulatory practice — to fill a gap that neither law firms nor academics were positioned to fill.
TEF's co-founders began practising in 1989 — and have practised through every phase of this transformation. The governance gap TEF exists to address was created in Phase 2 and has compounded, unexamined, through Phase 3.
Before 1991, India operated under strict import substitution. Trade barriers were among the world's highest. Nearly 90% of tradable goods required import licences. The CHA's role was navigating the Licence Raj — not valuation complexity. Global MNC structures and intercompany payment characterisation were not yet issues.
TEF's co-founders were present at every inflection — 1989, 1991, 1993, 2001, 2008, 2014. They watched the governance gap form as global MNCs entered India and characterised their intercompany payments narrowly for customs purposes while describing their group structures more broadly in their own annual reports. No institution has ever systematically cross-referenced those two bodies of public information. TEF was built to do exactly that.
The three phases of India's trade barrier evolution are not abstract history for TEF's founders. They are the professional biography of two brothers who began practising in the Licence Raj, watched the economy open and the governance gap form, and built TEF to address what that opening left unexamined.
Both co-founders hold licences granted by the Commissioner of Customs under the Customs Brokers Licensing Regulations — a regulated professional qualification requiring examination and approval by customs authorities.
A Custom House Agent (CHA) — now formally designated Customs Broker — is a professional licensed by the Commissioner of Customs to transact business on behalf of importers and exporters before Indian customs authorities. The licence requires passing examinations and is granted only after scrutiny by customs officials. CHAs are uniquely positioned to understand customs valuation, SVB proceedings and the regulatory interface between multinational group structures and Indian customs law.
Customs adjudication orders, SVB proceedings and CESTAT orders are public — but no organisation has been reading them alongside the same companies' annual reports and investor presentations. TEF does.
Custom House Agents, freight forwarders and trade professionals have no forum that can represent their collective governance and professional integrity interests before regulatory authorities and courts. TEF fills that role.
Academic and policy institutions studying customs and trade governance rarely have practitioners in the room. TEF brings 60 years of frontline customs practice to research that is typically confined to legal commentary or theoretical analysis.
Every research output and institutional submission is made in good faith, based on information reasonably believed to be accurate. This is not only an ethical commitment — it is a registered obligation in TEF's Memorandum of Association.
No submission is made without documented research. No governance letter is sent without cross-referencing the regulatory record against public disclosures. The research always precedes the action.
TEF operates only through lawful channels — governance engagement, statutory representations, financial institution memoranda and judicial proceedings. No extrajudicial pressure. No parallel process.
The professional integrity and livelihood of trade intermediaries — Custom House Agents, customs brokers and freight forwarders — is a core registered object of TEF, not an ancillary consideration.
TEF's research methodology is built on a single principle: every finding is sourced from documents that are already publicly available. We do not rely on leaks, insider disclosures or confidential information.
Two types of public document sit at the heart of every TEF research output: the customs adjudication record and the company's own public disclosures. The methodology maps the space between them.
Customs adjudication orders — whether from the Commissioner of Customs, CESTAT or the Special Valuation Branch — are public documents. They record the position companies took before the authority, the authority's findings, and often reproduce the company's own group structure descriptions within the record itself.
From the adjudication order, TEF extracts the exact characterisation advanced by the company for the intercompany payment — how the entity was described, what functions were attributed to it, and on what basis the payment was presented to Indian customs authorities.
TEF obtains the same company's annual reports, BRSR filings, investor presentations and group structure descriptions — all public documents. These state how the group describes its own entities, functions and intercompany arrangements to investors and the market.
Where the characterisation recorded in the adjudication order cannot be reconciled with the company's own public functional disclosures, that gap is the governance concern. TEF frames it precisely: not as a legal allegation, but as a governance question — were the facts accurate and consistent with the group's own public disclosures?
The documented governance concern is taken first to the company itself (governance review request), then — where the response is inadequate — to relevant regulatory authorities, and where further warranted, to financial institutions or courts. Each channel is sequential and conditional on the response received at the prior stage.
The analysis is based entirely on what the company itself has put in the public domain — in the regulatory record and in its own disclosures. What makes this methodology distinctive is not just the technique but the vantage point: TEF's founders were practising customs brokers when India's trade opened in the 1990s and these characterisation patterns first emerged. They observed the gap forming in real SVB proceedings — long before it became a research question. That firsthand fluency with adjudication orders, built across three decades of active practice, is not replicable by researchers, lawyers or policy analysts working from the outside.
Commissioner-level orders, CESTAT judgments, orders-in-original — all public, all containing the company's own submissions.
Special Valuation Branch proceedings documenting how intercompany transactions were characterised and assessed.
Directors' reports, financial statements, notes to accounts — containing group structure descriptions and related-party disclosures.
Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reports — containing ESG commitments and governance disclosures filed by listed entities.
Analyst presentations, IPO filings, capital market disclosures — often containing detailed group functional allocations and entity descriptions.
Exchange filings, related-party transaction disclosures, corporate governance reports — filed with SEBI and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.
TEF's core research programme focuses on a specific and recurring pattern that emerged during India's liberalisation phase: as global MNCs entered India from the early 1990s, they brought group structures — franchise arrangements, royalty flows, management charges — that Indian customs valuation had never previously encountered. The characterisations those companies advanced before customs authorities were not always consistent with how the same groups described their own structures in public disclosures. That gap — first observable in the SVB proceedings of the liberalisation era — is what TEF now systematically researches using public records.
A franchise fee or royalty is presented to Indian customs as compensating only a specific, limited function — retail concept, brand licence, or logistics support. The same group's own annual reports describe the paying entity as providing retail operations, range management, supply chain and logistics — a materially broader set of functions than the customs characterisation records.
A distinctive feature of this research programme is that the adjudication order itself often reproduces the company's own submissions about its group structure — including organisational charts and entity descriptions provided by the company. When compared against the same group's annual report, the inconsistency becomes visible within documents the company itself authored.
Where a company's representations before Indian customs cannot be reconciled with its own public functional disclosures, several governance and compliance questions arise — including the accuracy of representations made to a statutory authority, the completeness of related-party disclosures in audited accounts, and the integrity of the company's governance and oversight processes for cross-border transactions.
TEF documents the inconsistency as a governance question and takes it first to the company. The governance review request identifies the discrepancy, cites both source documents, and requests the company to verify the accuracy of its representations and review its controls. Only where the response is inadequate does TEF escalate to regulatory authorities.
Franchise fees characterised as compensating only "retail concept" or "brand use" before Indian customs — while the same group's disclosures describe the franchisor entity as providing range management, supply chain integration, technology platforms and full business model support.
Royalties presented as covering only intellectual property licensing for Indian customs purposes — while the licensor's own annual report describes the arrangement as encompassing know-how transfer, operational support, quality systems and ongoing service provision.
Material agreements, group arrangements and intercompany service contracts not disclosed to the SVB during enquiry proceedings — agreements that are referenced, or their terms described, in the same company's publicly filed annual reports and SEBI disclosures.
The same intercompany payment treated as an arms-length transaction for transfer pricing purposes — with a detailed functional analysis supporting the TP characterisation — while a materially different characterisation is advanced before Indian customs valuation authorities.
A public record of TEF's institutional submissions — governance letters, regulatory representations, financial institution memoranda and judicial filings. All submissions are based on public-record research undertaken in good faith.
TEF is constituting an independent Advisory Council of distinguished professionals — to provide institutional oversight of publications, governance assessments and public interest submissions, and to lend the credibility of expert review to TEF's work.
TEF's work is specialist. The Advisory Council does not need breadth — it needs depth in the disciplines that directly serve TEF's research and institutional mandate.
The founding Advisory Council is being constituted around professionals with deep experience in India customs law, customs valuation and CESTAT practice — retired Commissioners, former DRI officers, senior advocates who have practised before the Tribunal, or academics who have written seriously on customs valuation. These are the individuals whose institutional standing and subject-matter authority most directly strengthens TEF's research outputs and regulatory submissions.
Beyond customs, TEF seeks one or two members with depth in corporate governance and company law — to bring credibility to TEF's governance engagement work — and optionally a member with experience in public interest litigation, given TEF's objects include approaching courts and tribunals where research warrants it.
If you have spent your career in and around Indian customs, trade law or corporate governance — and believe that independent institutional scrutiny of how global companies conduct themselves before Indian regulatory authorities serves the public interest — TEF would welcome your involvement.
All Advisory Council positions are honorary. No remuneration, fees or financial consideration of any kind.
The Advisory Council has no role in day-to-day management, operations or administrative decisions of TEF.
The Advisory Council reviews TEF's research publications and governance assessments before release — providing institutional validation.
The Council meets at least annually to review TEF's research agenda, publications and institutional engagement — and to provide guidance on priorities.
Expert advisory oversight — particularly from retired jurists, senior counsel or former regulators — substantiates TEF's standing to bring public interest petitions under Articles 32 and 226 of the Constitution.
Submissions to DRI, SEBI, SFIO and CBIC that carry institutional endorsement from an expert advisory council are taken more seriously and are harder to dismiss procedurally.
Corporates responding to TEF governance letters may attempt to characterise submissions as motivated or vexatious. An independent advisory council that has reviewed the research substantially undermines this line of attack.
Companies and institutional donors considering CSR contributions to TEF are more likely to do so where an independent advisory council provides credible oversight of how funds are applied.
If you are a professional with expertise in one or more of the domains above and would be willing to serve in an honorary advisory capacity, TEF welcomes your expression of interest.
TEF will acknowledge all expressions of interest and respond to those that align with the Council's current composition needs. All information provided will be held in strict confidence.
TEF is a Section 8 company eligible to receive CSR contributions under Schedule VII of the Companies Act 2013. Companies with corporate social responsibility obligations may direct funds to TEF's governance research and public interest activities.
| Criterion | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Section 8 Company | ✓ Eligible | TEF is incorporated as a Section 8 company under the Companies Act 2013 |
| Schedule VII Alignment | ✓ Eligible | TEF's activities align with Schedule VII — promotion of education, governance, and livelihood enhancement |
| CSR-1 Registration | In Process | CSR-1 registration on MCA CSR portal — required before receiving CSR contributions |
| 80G Tax Exemption | Application in Process | Application to be filed with Income Tax authorities. Donors should note pending status. |
| FCRA Registration | Not yet eligible | FCRA registration requires 3 years of existence and track record. Not applicable at this stage. |
| Utilisation Reports | ✓ Provided | TEF provides utilisation certificates and annual reports to all donors |
| No Member Distribution | ✓ Confirmed | TEF's MOA prohibits distribution of income or assets to members — all funds applied to objects |
TEF's research, publications, training programmes and compliance awareness activities advance trade, customs and governance education.
TEF's support for trade intermediaries — Custom House Agents and customs brokers — whose livelihood may be affected by corporate misconduct or regulatory proceedings.
Where TEF's training and capacity-building programmes specifically support women trade professionals and intermediaries.
Not applicable to TEF.
Where TEF's trade facilitation and compliance awareness work supports rural export and import businesses.
Not the primary focus of TEF's work.
Contact TEF to discuss your CSR committee's focus areas and how TEF's work may align
TEF provides MOA, annual returns and all documents your CSR committee and legal advisers require
Activity-specific proposal prepared for CSR committee approval, with outcomes and reporting framework
Funds applied to agreed activities — research, publications, training programmes or institutional submissions
Utilisation certificate, progress report and MCA CSR portal compliance reporting provided to donor
Commissioning, conducting and publishing research reports, policy briefs and governance assessments
Preparation and filing of governance letters, regulatory representations and judicial filings
Seminars, workshops, training programmes for trade intermediaries and compliance professionals
Organisational infrastructure, knowledge platforms and institutional administration
TEF welcomes documented information from trade professionals, customs brokers, compliance officers and others with knowledge of customs valuation, SVB proceedings or intercompany arrangement disclosures.
Information about how a company has characterised franchise fees, royalties, management charges or other intercompany payments before Indian customs authorities
Information about under-valuation, SVB non-disclosure, misclassification or other potential non-compliance in customs or trade regulatory proceedings
Information about cases where a licensed Custom House Agent or trade professional faces proceedings in circumstances where the underlying non-compliance originated with the corporate principal
Information about material discrepancies between a company's ESG or BRSR disclosures and independently verifiable compliance data or regulatory records
Anonymous submissions are fully accepted. You are not required to provide any identifying information. If you wish to receive TEF's acknowledgement or be kept informed of developments, you may optionally provide contact details below.
Thank you. TEF has received your submission. All information is held in strict confidence and will be reviewed by TEF's research team in accordance with our documented triage process.