SEBI v. Rameshbhai Vanghjibhai Shah and others (synchronised trades in four scrips, 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 penalised ten members of an alleged Sanghvi trading group a total of Rs 18 lakh for synchronised trades that inflated volume and price in four BSE-listed stocks in 2009 and 2010. The case had been remanded by the Securities Appellate Tribunal twice, and the charge against a broker was not established.

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

1.8m 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

An adjudicating officer of SEBI issued this order on 27 June 2022 in the matter of trading in four BSE-listed shares: Nakoda Textiles India Limited, Gayatri Projects Limited, Nandan Exim Limited and Trimurthi Drugs & Pharmaceuticals Limited. Eleven noticees were named, ten alleged members of a 'Sanghvi Group', including Rameshbhai Vanghjibhai Shah, Dhirajbhai V Sanghvi HUF and Sanghvi Fincap Limited, plus the broker MTL Share & Stock Brokers Limited.

The order is the third round. SEBI first penalised the group Rs 5 crore in January 2014, then Rs 2.62 crore in July 2017, and the Securities Appellate Tribunal set aside each order and sent the matter back, in 2016 and again in 2018, for fresh hearings and disclosure of documents. The notice of May 2013 alleged that the group, linked by shared phone numbers, addresses and family ties, traded among themselves between July 2009 and January 2010 through synchronised and reversal trades, creating artificial volume and lifting prices.

The officer found the group's connections established and held that it manipulated price and volume in breach of section 12A of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3 and 4 of the 2003 fraud and unfair trade practices regulations. The profit figures in the investigation report were not relied upon because they mixed tainted and untainted trades, and the order treated the conduct as repetitive since the same noticees had been penalised in a separate matter in March 2022. The charge against the broker under the stock brokers' code of conduct was held not established.

The penalties were Rs 15,00,000 payable jointly and severally by the ten group noticees, and a further Rs 3,00,000 payable jointly and severally by the first three of them, a total of Rs 18,00,000. The order contains no market bar.

The record does not show whether the penalty was paid, whether a further appeal was filed, or the overall profit made.

This library tags the matter as matched orders and 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 2 techniques 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.
• Price manipulation — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2022-06-27 SEBI adjudication order (third round, after SAT remands)

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.