SEBI v. Akshay Jitendrakumar Brahambhatt (price manipulation, Bronze Trading, 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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In June 2022 a SEBI adjudicating officer fined an individual Rs 6,00,000 for pushing up the price of Bronze Trading Limited shares in late 2016 through repeated buy orders that lifted the last traded price. The inquiry began after BSE reported SMS and call tips recommending the stock with a target price.

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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Penalty as published

600k 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

An adjudicating officer of SEBI issued this order on 23 June 2022 against Akshay Jitendrakumar Brahambhatt in the matter of Bronze Trading Limited, a company listed directly on BSE in May 2016 whose shares were later suspended. SEBI began the inquiry after BSE reported SMS messages and calls recommending the purchase of the stock and giving a time-bound target price, and it examined trading from 5 July to 6 December 2016.

The show cause notice of 30 November 2021 alleged that between 10 November and 6 December 2016 the share price rose from Rs 35.80 to a high of Rs 51.70. It said Mr Brahambhatt was the largest single contributor to positive movements in the last traded price, with Rs 34.85 of the market's positive Rs 266.25, about 13 percent, through 334 trades against 104 scattered counterparties. SEBI charged breaches of section 12A of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3 and 4 of the 2003 fraud and unfair trade practices regulations.

The order finds that his pattern of orders was abnormal and unusual, that he placed many buy orders at levels that pushed the price up, and that his explanation of ordinary investment was not accepted. It holds that he manipulated the price and volume of the scrip and thus violated the cited provisions.

The penalty was Rs 6,00,000 under section 15HA of the SEBI Act. The officer said gain and investor loss could not be quantified and that no earlier default was on record.

The record does not show who sent the SMS and call recommendations, whether the noticee was linked to them, whether the penalty was paid or appealed, or any criminal case. The charges against the noticee rest on his trading and not on those messages.

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. 2022-06-23 SEBI adjudication 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.