SEBI v. Jyoti Devi and others (synchronised and reversal trades, Swan Energy, 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 April 2022 a SEBI adjudicating officer penalised 13 connected individuals Rs 5 lakh each, Rs 65 lakh in all, for synchronised and reversal trades that created artificial volume in Swan Energy shares between January and March 2015.

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

—

Penalty as published

6.5m 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

A SEBI adjudicating officer, Prasanta Mahapatra, decided the matter on 27 April 2022. The 13 noticees are individuals, led by Jyoti Devi and including Rajesh Kumar, who SEBI found to be connected to one another. The shares are those of Swan Energy Limited, listed on BSE and NSE, and SEBI examined trading from 1 January to 5 March 2015.

SEBI alleged that the group's synchronised trades, where buy and sell orders of matching quantity and price are entered within about a minute, accounted for about 12.26 per cent of market volume. It also alleged that the group put through 2,070 reversal trades on NSE, covering 7,38,134 shares and generating roughly 14.76 lakh shares of artificial volume, about 13.02 per cent of total market volume in the period. Trading at prices above the last traded price was said to have lifted the price.

The order concludes that the trades were abnormal, deceptive and artificial and were carried out to create a misleading appearance of trading, in breach of section 12A of the SEBI Act and regulations 3 and 4 of the PFUTP Regulations. It observes that intention is irrelevant once the contravention is shown.

The officer imposed a penalty of Rs 5,00,000 on each of the 13 noticees under section 15HA of the SEBI Act, Rs 65,00,000 in total. The order records that the gains and investors' losses were not quantified.

The record does not show whether the penalties were appealed or paid. SEBI's listing carries this order twice under separate numbers with identical text, so this library keeps one record.

This library tags the matter as matched orders and wash trading. 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.
• Wash trading — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2022-04-27 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.