SEBI v. Harishkumar Kantilal Patel and others (synchronised trades, Gala Global Products, 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 penalised 26 individual traders a combined Rs 1.76 crore for acting in concert through pre-arranged trades in Gala Global Products Limited that lifted the share price from Rs 161 to Rs 397 between December 2017 and April 2018. Each penalty was between Rs 5 lakh and Rs 10 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

—

Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

17.6m 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, Vijayant Kumar Verma, decided the matter on 22 March 2022. The 26 noticees are individuals identified by SEBI as unconnected to the company or its promoters but linked to each other. The first named is Harishkumar Kantilal Patel, and the shares are those of Gala Global Products Limited.

SEBI's investigation covered 28 December 2017 to 20 April 2018, during which the price rose by about 147 per cent, from Rs 161 to Rs 397. SEBI's analyses of synchronised trades, reversals, last-traded-price contributions and new-high-price trades indicated that the group repeatedly bought and sold among themselves, and many of them had gross buys equal to their gross sells.

The order rejects the noticees' claims that their trading followed a press release about a large government order, block and bulk deals, or company financials, noting that those events came after the trading began or at the end of the period, and that genuine investors would hold rather than round-trip. It holds that the 26 traded in concert in a pre-determined way, creating a misleading appearance of trading and manipulating the price, in breach of regulations 3 and 4 of the PFUTP Regulations. It treats proof of individual investor losses as unnecessary.

Penalties of between Rs 5 lakh and Rs 10 lakh were imposed on each noticee under section 15HA of the SEBI Act, Rs 1,76,00,000 (Rs 1.76 crore) in total. The order says the investigation did not quantify the gains the noticees made.

The record does not show whether the penalties were appealed or paid, or who profited from the price rise.

This library tags the matter as matched orders 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.

• Matched orders — 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. 2022-03-22 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.

Same matter

The library links these 2 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.