SEBI v. Vaibhav Dhadda and others (Fidelity funds 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 3 June 2022 a SEBI whole-time member barred Vaibhav Dhadda, a Fidelity trader, and ten relatives and associates from the market, ordered disgorgement with interest, and imposed penalties totalling about Rs 4.28 crore over front-running of 21 Fidelity group entities' orders.

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

42.8m 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 whole-time member, Ananta Barua, decided the matter on 3 June 2022 by a 121-page final order following an interim impounding order of 7 June 2021. The eleven noticees were Vaibhav Dhadda (also known as Avi Dhadda), his relatives Alka Dhadda and Arushi Dhadda, and eight further individuals and a Hindu undivided family who held front-running accounts. SEBI investigated February to November 2019.

The order finds that Mr Dhadda, an employee of Fidelity International who became a sales trader for 21 Fidelity group entities in 2019, gave trade instructions to the trading members for those entities and knew of their orders a day ahead. SEBI alleged and the order found that orders were placed through the accounts of the other noticees just ahead of the Fidelity entities' large buy and sell orders so as to profit from the price effect. The violations were of section 12A of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3 and 4 of the 2003 fraudulent and unfair trade practices regulations.

Mr Dhadda was barred from the securities market for three years and the other ten noticees for two years. Noticees were directed to disgorge their gains with 12 per cent annual interest, and sums already impounded were treated as disgorgement for five of them. Penalties under section 15HA were Rs 1.77 crore on Mr Dhadda, Rs 1.10 crore on Alka Dhadda and smaller amounts from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 28 lakh on the others, a total of about Rs 4.28 crore.

The record does not show the total gains disgorged, how the front-running profits were split, whether any noticee appealed, or any criminal proceedings. The amounts above come from the operative table of the order.

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. 2022-06-03 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.