SEBI v. Heena Mukesh Tolia and others (price ramping in an illiquid scrip, Viaan Industries, 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 imposed a joint penalty of Rs 5,00,000 on two buyers and two sellers who repeatedly pushed up the price of the illiquid Viaan Industries scrip from Rs 10.60 to Rs 333.90 using above-market buy orders matched by tiny sell orders.

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

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, Suresh B Menon, decided the matter on 28 April 2022. The noticees are four individuals: Heena Mukesh Tolia and Bharati Vilesh Dalal, who were mainly buyers, and Manoj Mangesh Powar and Jatin Chandra Barua, their main counterparty sellers. The shares are those of Viaan Industries Limited (formerly Hindustan Safety Glass Industries), which was directly listed on BSE in February 2014 after trading on the Calcutta exchange stopped.

The scrip hardly traded at BSE after listing. SEBI's investigation, covering the period to December 2015, found the price moved from Rs 10.60 on 8 September 2014 to Rs 333.90 on 23 November 2015, mostly through the first trades of the day. SEBI alleged that the two buyers repeatedly entered buy orders above the last traded price and that the two sellers, despite larger buy quantities being available, repeatedly sold only one or a few shares at the higher prices, so that the trades matched every time.

The order holds that the sellers were not genuine sellers and that the four had an understanding, so that every trade set a price above the last one in a scrip lacking sound fundamentals. It finds that they manipulated the price and created a misleading appearance of trading, in breach of section 12A of the SEBI Act and regulations 3 and 4 of the PFUTP Regulations, adding that intention is not required for a penalty.

A total penalty of Rs 5,00,000 was imposed under section 15HA of the SEBI Act, payable jointly and severally by the four.

The record does not show whether the penalty was appealed or paid, or the noticees' profits or other investors' losses.

This library tags the matter as price manipulation and matched orders. 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.

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

Timeline

1. 2022-04-28 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.