SEBI v. Santosh Kumar Agarwal and others (price rise in Nikki Global Finance, 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 adjudicating officer found that ten Kanpur-based individuals and companies, linked to each other and to the issuer, bought Nikki Global Finance shares in ways that pushed the price up almost 2,837 percent while the company's results did not justify it. The January 2022 order imposed Rs 5 lakh on each, Rs 50 lakh in total.

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

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Penalty as published

5m INR

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. This regulator states penalties in INR. The figure is recorded as published and is not converted, so it does not appear in the USD totals or medians used elsewhere on this site.

What is alleged to have happened

The adjudication order of 28 January 2022 was passed by a SEBI adjudicating officer under Section 15-I of the SEBI Act. It names ten noticees, all based in Kanpur: Santosh Kumar Agarwal, Kamta Prasad Pandey, Raj Kumar Agarwal, Rishi Kant Awasthi, Rita Jain and Surendra Kumar Gupta, and the companies Success Vyapar, Anant Fin Consultancy, Adinath Shares and Commodities and MHDS Stone Edge, formerly Priyanshi Securities. The matter concerned trading in the shares of Nikki Global Finance Limited between July 2009 and May 2014.

SEBI alleged that these noticees were among 301 connected entities trading the scrip. In the first period, from July 2009 to February 2012, the price was recorded as rising from Rs 7.80 to a high of Rs 375, while the company reported tiny sales and profits of one to four paise per rupee crore of income. The noticees, who SEBI said were tied to the company, its promoters and directors, were among the 90 entities that traded as buyers in that period.

Using a last-traded-price analysis, the order found that the noticees' purchases contributed 31.24 percent of the market's positive price movement while accounting for 26.7 percent of market volume, and that nine of them together made a net contribution of Rs 766.48 against a market-wide net figure of Rs 326.15. It held that there was no reasonable explanation for buying heavily at sharply rising prices other than an ulterior purpose, and found Regulations 3(a), 3(c), 4(1), 4(2)(a) and 4(2)(e) of the PFUTP Regulations contravened by all ten.

The officer noted that the material did not show any disproportionate gain made by the noticees or any loss to investors, and imposed a penalty of Rs 5 lakh on each under Section 15HA of the SEBI Act, Rs 50 lakh in total, payable within 45 days. No trading restraint was ordered in this adjudication.

The record does not show whether any noticee appealed, what they earned, or what became of the other connected entities in the group of 301. It describes no criminal case. The provisional marking-the-close tag does not describe the conduct found in this order.

This library tags the matter as price manipulation. 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.

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

Timeline

1. 2022-01-28 SEBI adjudication order imposing penalties

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.

Related actions

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

Record added October 8, 2026. submit a correction.