SEBI v. Ashlesh Gunvantibhai Shah and others (Cupid Trades and Finance synchronized trades, 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 31 May 2022, on remand from the Securities Appellate Tribunal, a SEBI adjudicating officer closed proceedings against five traders accused of synchronized trades in Cupid Trades and Finance shares. The officer found no established connection or manipulative intent 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, Barnali Mukherjee, decided the matter on 31 May 2022. The five noticees were Ashlesh Gunvantibhai Shah, Paresh Ramjibhai Chauhan, Vipul Virendrabhai Patel, Jayshriben Maniyar and Piyush Batukbhai Dave, who traded Cupid Trades and Finance Ltd, listed on BSE, between June and November 2013.

An earlier adjudication order of 29 March 2019 held 11 entities in breach of Regulations 3 and 4 of the 2003 fraudulent and unfair trade practices regulations on the basis of synchronized trades. Five of them appealed, and on 15 September 2021 the Securities Appellate Tribunal sent the matter back, asking the officer to establish the connections among them and the other entities and to decide whether the synchronized trades were coincidence or the product of a meeting of minds.

On the remand the officer found that no direct connection among the noticees had been shown, that the submissions pointed to a change of beneficial ownership, and that the synchronized trades were too small a share of market volume to have created artificial volume. Citing Tribunal rulings that synchronized trades are not unlawful unless done to manipulate the market and that a charge of fraud cannot rest on conjecture, the officer concluded that the violations were not established. One noticee had said that her late husband had done the trading.

The proceedings begun by the show-cause notice of 31 October 2017 were disposed of with no penalty.

The record does not show whether SEBI appealed, or how the other six entities in the 2019 order were treated. This is a disposal of allegations and not a finding that the trades were genuine.

This library tags the matter as matched orders. 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.

• Matched orders — 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.