SEBI v. DP Mittal and Sons HUF and others (single synchronised trade, Florence Investech, 2022)

Dismissed

✓ 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.

Report an error in this record (sebi-57793-matched-orders-2022) by email

In April 2022 a SEBI adjudicating officer closed, without penalty, a case alleging that two clients of a broker lifted the price of Florence Investech by 19 per cent with a single 50-share synchronised trade seconds after a promoter block deal. The officer found one tiny trade and no proven link insufficient to show manipulation.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

—

Disgorgement

—

Prejudgment interest

—

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

A SEBI adjudicating officer, Soma Majumder, decided the matter on 8 April 2022. The noticees were DP Mittal and Sons HUF, an investor, Renu Bala, another investor, and their broker SPFL Securities Ltd. The shares are those of Florence Investech Limited, listed on BSE. SEBI's investigation covered March 2017.

SEBI alleged that on 22 March 2017, within seconds of promoter-to-promoter block deals at Rs 640.05, the broker entered a sell order for 50 shares for Ms Bala and a matching buy order for the HUF at Rs 760, from adjacent terminals and the same user, 5.4 seconds apart. That single trade lifted the last traded price by about 19 per cent. It was said to be manipulation in breach of section 12A of the SEBI Act and regulations 3 and 4 of the PFUTP Regulations, and the broker was said to have facilitated it.

The officer held that no connection between the two clients, or between them and the promoters, was established, that no direct evidence of intent was offered, and that SEBI did not show frequency, value or any other pattern. Relying on Supreme Court and Securities Appellate Tribunal authority that a single instance of a negligible quantity does not itself show manipulation, the officer held the allegations not established against the two clients and found no case against the broker.

The proceedings were disposed of without any penalty.

The record does not show whether SEBI appealed, and the order does not explain the 19 per cent jump other than finding it insufficient to infer manipulation.

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. 2022-04-08 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.