SEBI v. GRD Securities Limited and Berkeley Securities Limited (Arcotech trading, 2022)

Dismissed

✓ 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 closed proceedings against two stock brokers, GRD Securities and Berkeley Securities, accused of moving the price of Arcotech shares through small trades. The officer gave them the benefit of the doubt and imposed no penalty.

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

A SEBI adjudicating officer, Vijayant Kumar Verma, decided the matter on 27 May 2022. The noticees were two stock brokers, GRD Securities Ltd and Berkeley Securities Ltd. SEBI had investigated trading in Arcotech Ltd, listed on BSE and NSE, between September 2015 and April 2018 after a complaint alleging price manipulation. The period covered a 1:5 stock split in June 2017.

SEBI alleged that the two brokers made trades, often in very small quantities, that added to the stock's last traded price in one patch of the period and, for the first noticee, pulled the price down through negative contributions in later patches. The alleged violations were of Regulations 3 and 4 of the 2003 fraudulent and unfair trade practices regulations and the broker code of conduct.

The officer found the trading pattern did not look like genuine regular trading, but nonetheless held the evidence short of the standard of preponderance of probabilities. The reasons, following a Securities Appellate Tribunal ruling in BDS Share Brokers, included that both firms were also active as jobbers, traded on both sides in each patch, traded in many other stocks, and were charged only on selected buy or sell trades. The first noticee also showed a net loss of about Rs 1.22 lakh in the stock. No collusion with a counterparty or other connected person was alleged.

The charges under the fraud provisions and the broker code of conduct were dropped, the notices were disposed of for both noticees and no penalty was imposed.

The record does not show whether SEBI appealed. This is a disposal giving the benefit of doubt and not a finding that the trading was lawful or unlawful.

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.