SEBI v. Manish Chaturvedi and others (Sterling Group front-running, 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 31 May 2022 a SEBI adjudicating officer fined Manish, Laxmi and Manohar Chaturvedi a total of Rs 32 lakh in the lead order of the Sterling Group front-running matter. Rs 30 lakh of that is joint and several for the fraud, and Rs 2 lakh falls on Manish alone for not complying with summons.

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

3.2m 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 31 May 2022. The noticees were Manish Chaturvedi, Laxmi Chaturvedi and Manohar Chaturvedi, who share an address in Mumbai. This is the lead order in the matter of front-running by Manish Chaturvedi and others, which produced a series of orders against the people whose accounts were used.

SEBI received NSE reports in 2010 and 2011 about suspected front-running of trades by about ten entities known as the Sterling Group between January 2010 and March 2011, and investigated from March 2009 to March 2011, including trades on BSE. It identified entities front-running the group's trades, a second group, including Manish and Manohar, that allegedly aided and abetted them, and the ten entities whose trades were front-run. The order tabulates the profits earned on days when trading matched the Sterling Group's, against much smaller profits on other days.

The officer found that the Chaturvedis aided and abetted front-running in their trading accounts and defrauded the market while enriching themselves, in breach of section 12A and Regulations 3 and 4(1) of the 2003 fraudulent and unfair trade practices regulations. The penalty under section 15HA was Rs 30 lakh, payable jointly and severally by all three. Manish Chaturvedi also received a Rs 2 lakh penalty under section 15HB for failing to comply with SEBI summons, giving the total of Rs 32 lakh recorded here.

The record does not show the total gain attributed to the three, whether they appealed, or how much of any disgorgement has been recovered.

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. 2022-05-31 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.