SEBI v. Nishil Surendrabhai Marfatia (large sell orders deleted, Veronica Production, 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 a stockbroking firm director Rs 5,00,000 for placing very large sell orders in an illiquid stock, Veronica Production Limited, and cancelling them within moments in January 2017. The order rejected his explanation that a faulty keyboard key caused extra zeros.

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

500k 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 27 June 2022 against Nishil Surendrabhai Marfatia, a director of the BSE stockbroker Marfatia Stockbroking Pvt. Ltd., in the matter of Veronica Production Limited (formerly Jagran Productions Ltd). SEBI investigated trading from January to February 2017 after a BSE report, and the show cause notice is dated 20 July 2020.

SEBI alleged that on 4 and 9 January 2017 he entered six sell orders totalling 2.5 crore shares through his firm and deleted them almost at once, in a stock trading at about Rs 0.18 to Rs 0.20 that was illiquid. This, it said, added large false quantities to the order book and misled other investors about market depth. A stock tip on a website urging purchase of the stock on 2 January 2017 was noted as context, but he was not charged with it.

He explained that a dealer's malfunctioning zero key had added extra zeros to intended small orders, and that he was a jobber placing and cancelling orders at speed. The order rejects both points. The orders were entered and removed across three separate terminals on two different days, one order was modified from 4 lakh to 40 lakh shares within seconds, and his account showed no jobbing in the stock. The officer found the orders were not bona fide and gave a misleading picture of supply, a breach of section 12A of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3 and 4 of the 2003 fraud and unfair trade practices regulations.

The penalty was Rs 5,00,000 under section 15HA of the SEBI Act, payable within 45 days.

The record does not show any profit to him, whether any other trader benefited, whether the penalty was paid or appealed, or any criminal case.

This library tags the matter as spoofing. 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.

• Spoofing — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2022-06-27 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.