SEBI v. Omprakash Basantlal Goenka and others (Citrus Check Inns unregistered holiday scheme, 2026)
Judgment entered
Checked against the primary document on October 9, 2026. The library's summary, tags and figures for this record were compared with the regulator's own document by an AI model (Claude) following written instructions, in a single reading of the order; an independent second reading of 60 SEBI records agreed on every field for 56, the four misses being penalty amounts; a later sample of 50 of the SEBI records added on 9 October agreed on every field for 46. No lawyer has reviewed them. A checked record can still contain errors, and checked does not mean endorsed. See how we check records or report a correction.
In June 2026 a SEBI adjudicating officer penalised four directors of Citrus Check Inns Limited a total of Rs 1.10 crore for fraudulent mobilisation of about Rs 2,722 crore from the public through unregistered holiday investment plans. The company, in insolvency, was disposed of without penalty.
The record
| Agency | SEBI (India) |
|---|---|
| Date filed | 2026-06-30 |
| Date resolved | 2026-06-30 |
| Court | SEBI Adjudicating Officer |
| Status | judgment |
| Asset class | other |
| Instruments | unregistered collective investment scheme (holiday plans) |
| Criminal parallel | No |
| Defendants | Citrus Check Inns Limited ; Omprakash Basantlal Goenka ; Prakash Ganpat Utekar ; Venkatraman Natarajan ; Narayan Shivram Kotnis |
| Techniques |
What was ordered
- Civil penalty
- —
- Disgorgement
- —
- Prejudgment interest
- —
- Total relief
- —
- Alleged gain
- —
- Penalty as published
- 11m INR
What is alleged to have happened
This adjudication order of 30 June 2026 involves Citrus Check Inns Limited and its four directors, Omprakash Basantlal Goenka, Prakash Ganpat Utekar, Venkatraman Natarajan and Narayan Shivram Kotnis. It follows a complaint of January 2014 that the company was running a Ponzi scheme and refusing refunds. SEBI concluded on preliminary examination that it was collecting money through an unregistered collective investment scheme and issued an interim order in June 2015.
The path to this order was long. The Securities Appellate Tribunal upheld the view that the business was a collective investment scheme but set aside the directions, the Supreme Court reversed that in November 2016 and told SEBI to finish its investigation, and a sale and monitoring committee under a retired judge was set up to sell the company's property and refund investors. The company entered insolvency proceedings in 2017 that the Supreme Court later stayed. After a Supreme Court order of August 2024 allowing SEBI to proceed, a show cause notice was issued on 23 April 2026.
The order finds that the company raised about Rs 2,722 crore from about 12.8 lakh investors under seven investment plans, covering holiday plans from 2011-12 to 2014-15, in what it treats as an unregistered collective investment scheme, and that the directors are liable for violating Regulation 4(2)(t) of the PFUTP Regulations, which deems such conduct by directors a fraudulent practice. The officer rejected arguments that the court-supervised asset sale and refund process made a penalty unnecessary, saying liability under section 15HA is personal.
The company's notice was disposed of without penalty. Penalties under section 15HA were Rs 35 lakh on Mr Goenka, who held 94 percent of the company at incorporation, and Rs 25 lakh each on the other three directors, Rs 1.10 crore in all, payable within 45 days. The officer noted that the notice did not quantify gain or investor loss, that the directors had been found involved in an earlier unregistered scheme at another company, and that refunds were under way independently.
The record does not show how much has been refunded, whether the directors appealed, or any criminal case.
This library applies no technique tag to the matter, because no technique, because the order concerns an unregistered investment scheme penalised under a director-specific fraud provision rather than a pattern in the library; the complaint's Ponzi label was not itself found. The tagging is ours, not the regulator's.
For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above. This page deliberately summarises the structured record rather than reproducing the order.
Timeline
- 2026-06-30 SEBI adjudication order
Primary documents
Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.