SEBI v. Finquest Securities Pvt. Ltd. (broker facilitating synchronized trades, Asian Granito India, 2022)

Judgment entered

✓ Checked against the primary document on October 8, 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.

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A SEBI whole-time member found that the stock broker Finquest Securities executed repeated synchronized trades for a connected group of sixteen clients in Asian Granito India shares and was itself connected to that group. In January 2022 the order barred the broker from taking new clients for two months, with no monetary penalty.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

—

Alleged gain

—

A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars.

What is alleged to have happened

The final order of 18 January 2022 was passed by a SEBI whole-time member under Section 12(3) of the SEBI Act and the Intermediaries Regulations, 2008, against Finquest Securities Pvt. Ltd., a registered stock broker and member of NSE and BSE. It followed an enquiry report by a designated authority dated 27 July 2020 and a show-cause notice of 25 August 2020; the enquiry had recommended a six-month suspension of the broker's registration.

SEBI's case was that a group of 16 connected persons, called the Bharat Patel Group, repeatedly executed synchronized trades in the shares of Asian Granito India Limited between December 2011 and October 2014, creating a misleading appearance of trading with no intention of changing ownership. Finquest executed the trades as broker and in some cases as counterparty broker: 26 synchronized trades for 21,42,281 shares, of which 13 trades at BSE, for 12,27,197 shares, were put at 10.62 percent of market volume in the period.

Finquest argued that the notice was long delayed, that it traded only on client instructions, that the trades were small relative to its turnover, were reported to the exchanges at market prices with delivery, and that its link to the group was merely a broker-client relationship. The order rejected the delay argument, noting that the Act sets no limitation period and that the broker had the material to defend itself, and treated the delay only as relevant to the sanction. It found that the broker's own directors were part of the client group, and held that the broker had facilitated the trades in breach of Section 12A of the SEBI Act, Regulations 3 and 4 of the PFUTP Regulations and the brokers' code of conduct.

For this the order prohibited Finquest from taking up any new client as a stock broker for two months from the date of the order, effective immediately. It imposed no monetary penalty on the broker. It records that in a separate order of 20 October 2021 the group's clients had been penalised Rs 10 lakh and restrained from the market for one year.

The record does not show whether Finquest appealed. The order does not give the clients' gains or any loss to other investors, and it describes no criminal case.

This library tags the matter as matched orders. 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.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with one technique in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

• Matched orders — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2022-01-18 SEBI whole-time member final order against the broker

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• SEBI order
• Order (PDF)

The linked release is published by the issuing regulator under its own terms. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Same matter

The library links these 3 records because they appear to concern one matter: the same lead defendant, an overlapping technique tag and close filing dates, or a shared court docket or a release that cites the other. Records are listed by date filed.

This grouping is the library's, made by matching names, techniques, dates and citations when the site is built. It is not the regulator's or a court's determination that the records are one case, and it errs towards missing a link rather than making a false one.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added October 8, 2026. submit a correction.