SEBI v. Vishal Vijay Shah (Sterling Group front-running broker, 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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A SEBI adjudicating officer fined stock broker Vishal Vijay Shah a total of Rs 8 lakh in April 2022 in the Manish Chaturvedi front-running matter. The order finds he created false records of trades for two entities and did not comply with SEBI summonses.

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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Penalty as published

800k 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 29 April 2022. The noticee was Vishal Vijay Shah, a registered stock broker trading as a proprietorship in Mumbai. The order is one of several in the matter of front-running by Manish Chaturvedi and others, which started from NSE surveillance reports on the trades of about ten companies and entities known as the Sterling Group between 2010 and 2011.

SEBI alleged that Mr Shah issued fictitious documents to Laxmi Chaturvedi and Viraj Mercantile Pvt Ltd for trades that had not occurred through him on BSE, creating false records. It also alleged that he failed to produce the documents and comply with summonses in 2013, in breach of sections 11C(2) and 11C(3) of the SEBI Act, and breached the broker code of conduct. Mr Shah argued that the notice rested on assumptions, that the two were never his clients, that he issued no fake contract notes, and that the notice came more than 2,000 days after the summons.

The officer found the violations established and noted that penalty follows contravention regardless of intent. He imposed Rs 2 lakh for the summons failures, Rs 3 lakh for fraud under section 12A and the PFUTP regulations, and Rs 3 lakh for breach of the broker code of conduct, a total of Rs 8,00,000, payable within 45 days. The order noted that SEBI had earlier suspended his broker registration for six months in December 2018, and that no profit or loss figure for the violations was available.

The record does not show whether the penalty was appealed or paid, or how much unlawful gain, if any, flowed from the trades his records covered.

This library tags the matter as front running. 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 one technique 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.

• Front running — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2022-04-29 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

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.