SEBI v. Rajendrakumar Chhotamalji Mehta (self-trades, Pine Animation, 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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In March 2022 a SEBI adjudicating officer fined an individual Rs 5,00,000 for ten self-trades in Pine Animation Limited shares on BSE that were found to have pushed the last traded price down within a wider scheme. A separate whole-time member order had already barred him from the market for five years.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

—

Penalty as published

500k 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

A SEBI adjudicating officer, Prasanta Mahapatra, decided the matter on 14 March 2022. The sole noticee is Rajendrakumar Chhotamalji Mehta, and the shares are those of Pine Animation Limited (formerly Four K Animation Limited), listed on BSE. SEBI had investigated after a steep rise in the traded volume and price of the scrip between March 2013 and January 2015.

SEBI's investigation concluded that the company, its directors and connected entities took part in a scheme in which promoters moved their shares off-market through linked entities, which then sold on the exchange at inflated prices. The noticee was alleged to have joined in by executing self-trades, where he was both buyer and seller, during the final stretch from July 2014 to January 2015, when the price fell from Rs 94 to under Rs 40. The ten self-trades were said to account for 6.09 per cent of the market's negative last-traded-price contribution.

The adjudicating officer concluded that the self-trades created a false or misleading appearance of trading and that the noticee had breached section 12A of the SEBI Act and the PFUTP Regulations. The order treated the ten trades on separate days as repetitive but noted that neither his gain nor investors' losses had been quantified.

A penalty of Rs 5,00,000 was imposed under section 15HA of the SEBI Act. In setting it, the officer took into account a 2019 whole-time member order on the same facts that barred the noticee from the securities market for five years.

The record does not show whether the penalty was appealed or paid, or the noticee's profit or loss from the trades.

This library tags the matter as wash trading and 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 2 techniques 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.

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

Timeline

1. 2022-03-14 SEBI 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.

• 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.