SEBI v. Vazhacholil Paul Xavier (small buy orders, Nouveau Global Ventures, 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 an individual trader placed tiny buy orders in Nouveau Global Ventures priced above the last traded price on many days in 2012 and 2013, adding to the scrip's price rise. The January 2022 order imposed a penalty of Rs 1 lakh.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

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Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

100k 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 against Vazhacholil Paul Xavier in the matter of price manipulation in the scrip of Nouveau Global Ventures Ltd. It is a companion to the same-day order against six companies in the same scrip, and arose from the same investigation, which began with references from the Income Tax Department about bogus long-term capital gains generated through the exchange.

SEBI alleged that, in the later part of the investigation period, Mr Xavier executed 52 trades that contributed a net Rs 48.20 to the last traded price, of which 32 trades with buy orders of between 1 and 50 shares accounted for about 9 percent of the market's positive price movement. The order says many of these orders were priced above the prevailing last traded price or above pending sell orders, so each trade set a higher price, although larger sell quantities were available.

In his reply Mr Xavier said he had lost a senior job in 2012, had no earlier trading history and had begun trading as a novice, favouring volatile stocks. The officer treated the trading pattern as inconsistent with a genuine buyer, found that the 32 trades inflated the price with the intention of manipulating the market or defeating its mechanism, and held Regulations 3(a) to (d), 4(1), 4(2)(a) and 4(2)(e) of the PFUTP Regulations breached.

No figure for gain or investor loss was available, and the officer weighed that the trades dated from 2012 and 2013. A penalty of Rs 1,00,000 was imposed under Section 15HA, payable within 45 days. No trading restraint was ordered.

The record does not show whether Mr Xavier appealed or whether he had any link to the other noticees in the scrip. It describes no criminal case.

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 a penalty

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.