SEBI v. Gandiv Investment Pvt. Ltd. and others (Ponni Sugars (Erode) 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 27 May 2022 a SEBI adjudicating officer, acting on remand from the Securities Appellate Tribunal, fined Gandiv Investment Rs 15 lakh and Pat Financial Consultants Rs 10 lakh for buying Ponni Sugars shares above the last traded price to lift it. The third noticee had died and no penalty was set on him.

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

2.5m 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, Barnali Mukherjee, decided the matter on 27 May 2022. The noticees were Gandiv Investment Pvt Ltd, Pat Financial Consultants Pvt Ltd and Bharat Jayantilal Patel, a director of the second company and of a broking firm, Finquest, through which Gandiv traded. The stock was Ponni Sugars (Erode) Ltd, examined from November 2012 to October 2014. A first adjudication order of January 2019 had been set aside by the Securities Appellate Tribunal in October 2021 because it did not explain how the price effect had been calculated, and the matter was sent back for a fresh decision.

SEBI alleged that the three were connected, through Mr Patel's directorships, fund transfers and off-market share transfers, and that they placed buy orders above the last traded price and the best available price, so lifting the price in two patches of the period. According to the order, Gandiv and Mr Patel supplied about 73 per cent of the market's positive price movement on NSE and 71 per cent on BSE in the second patch, and Pat Financial and Mr Patel contributed in the fourth. The price rose from Rs 235.45 to Rs 372 in the second patch and from Rs 90.1 to Rs 239.15 in the fourth, with no corporate announcements in those windows. The alleged violations were of Regulations 3 and 4 of the 2003 fraudulent and unfair trade practices regulations.

The officer, re-examining the trades as the Tribunal asked, held the violations established and treated them as repeated, because both companies had been penalised in earlier matters. The penalties under section 15HA were Rs 15,00,000 on Gandiv and Rs 10,00,000 on Pat Financial Consultants. Mr Patel died on 29 May 2021, and since the Act allows a penalty to be enforced against a deceased person's representative only if it was imposed before death, no penalty was set on him.

The record does not show total profit or investor loss, which the order says the investigation did not quantify, nor whether the penalties were appealed again.

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. 2022-05-27 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

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.