SEBI v. Ethan Constructions Private Limited (Allied Computers International price rigging, 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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On 24 May 2022 a SEBI adjudicating officer fined Ethan Constructions Rs 5 lakh for trades in Allied Computers International that helped push up the share price as part of a connected group. The case began from an Income Tax Department reference about a long-term capital gains scheme.

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, Prasanta Mahapatra, decided the matter on 24 May 2022. The sole noticee was Ethan Constructions Pvt Ltd. SEBI investigated Allied Computers International (Asia) Ltd after the Income Tax Department referred the stock as possibly part of a wider scheme to generate fictitious long-term capital gains, covering November 2007 to September 2012. The price rose from Rs 21 to a closing high of Rs 74.35 in December 2007 and then fell sharply.

SEBI's investigation identified 49 connected entities and examined how much each added to upward movements in the last traded price. According to the order, 18 of them bought during one patch of the period, the group supplied about 67 per cent of the market's positive price contribution, and some entities sold to others in the group to help lift the price. Ethan was alleged to have executed trades that raised the price, in breach of Regulations 3 and 4 of the 2003 fraudulent and unfair trade practices regulations.

The officer found the violations established. Although no gain or investor loss could be quantified, the order says a steep, artificial rise could draw in ordinary investors and undermine price discovery. Taking into account that a whole-time member had on 27 August 2021 barred Ethan from the securities market for three months in parallel proceedings, the officer imposed a penalty of Rs 5,00,000 (Rs 5 lakh) under section 15HA, payable within 45 days.

The record does not show Ethan's profit, the number of its trades, whether it appealed, or how other group members were treated.

This library tags the matter as 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 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.

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

Timeline

1. 2022-05-24 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.