SEBI v. AmrapaliAadya Trading and Investment Pvt. Ltd. and others (broker client-fund diversion, 2022)

Judgment entered

✓ Checked against the primary document on October 9, 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 an NSE broker, its sister company and seven current or former directors for diverting client money and securities, with fraud findings under the PFUTP Regulations. The order puts the amount siphoned at about Rs 411.30 crore and sets a joint and several penalty of Rs 25 crore alongside smaller individual penalties.

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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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

The order of 28 April 2022 deals with the stock broker AmrapaliAadya Trading and Investment Pvt. Ltd., the related company Aadya Commodities Pvt. Ltd. and seven directors or former directors. It followed an NSE inspection report of 2017 and a SEBI interim order of August 2017 restraining the group, later confirmed in 2018.

SEBI alleged a broad range of misconduct: failure to answer summons, siphoning of client funds and securities, failure to segregate client assets, pledging client securities for the group's own borrowing, routing money to related entities, running fixed-return arrangements with clients, selling client securities from an employee account, undisclosed demat accounts, skipped running-account settlements, ignored investor complaints and falsified books. The charges rested on the SEBI Act, the PFUTP Regulations, the Stock Brokers Regulations and exchange circulars.

The adjudicating officer found that the two companies devised a scheme to defraud their clients by siphoning client securities and funds of roughly Rs 411.30 crore, which breached Regulations 3(a) to (d) of the PFUTP Regulations, and also found the other listed breaches. The directors were held responsible for the firms' conduct, though the officer took a milder view of some of them because of their tenure and role, and noted that a parallel Whole Time Member order of August 2021 had already dealt with the directions side of the case.

On penalties, each company was fined Rs 25 lakh under section 15A(a) and Rs 1 crore under section 15C of the SEBI Act, and the broker was fined a further Rs 1 crore under section 23D of the Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act. A penalty of Rs 25 crore under sections 15HA and 15HB and section 23H of that Act was imposed jointly and severally on the two companies, Sanjeeva Kumar Sinha, Amita Sinha and Vandana Sinha. Sujeet Kumar Sona and Pawan Mishra were each fined Rs 7 lakh, Narayan Jee Thakur Rs 25 lakh and Abnish Kumar Sudhanshu Rs 15 lakh. Because the Rs 25 crore is shared and the figures overlap, this record does not state a single total.

The record does not show whether the penalties were paid or appealed, how much of the client money was ever returned, or whether any criminal case followed. SEBI penalises here and does not convict.

This library tags the matter as a broker fraud on clients that fits none of the library's technique pages, so no technique is assigned. 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.

Timeline

1. 2022-04-28 SEBI adjudication order (28 April 2022)

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.

Record added October 8, 2026. submit a correction.