SEBI v. Prem Lata Nahar and others (price manipulation, Greencrest Financial Services, 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.

Report an error in this record (sebi-60362-price-manipulation-2022) by email

In June 2022 a SEBI adjudicating officer penalised 14 of 18 noticees a total of Rs 24 lakh for driving up the price of the thinly traded Greencrest Financial Services shares in 2013 and 2014 by trading among themselves, with three entities supplying the shares and funds. The company, its two directors and one allottee were let off without a penalty.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

—

Disgorgement

—

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

—

Penalty as published

2.4m 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 29 June 2022 against 18 noticees in the matter of Greencrest Financial Services Limited, a BSE-listed company. SEBI examined trading from March 2012 to July 2015, a period that included two preferential share allotments at Rs 12 a share when the market price was Rs 6.92.

SEBI alleged that in a first phase from May 2013 to June 2014 only 16 buyers and 15 sellers traded the stock, and the price climbed from Rs 7.26 to Rs 264.30 in 132 trades. After a 10 for 1 split in June 2014 the volume rose sharply and the price reached an adjusted Rs 69.85, a market value of about Rs 2,553 crore against reported annual profits of Rs 0.7 crore and Rs 1.16 crore. It said eleven noticees, two buyers and nine sellers, repeatedly placed orders above the last traded price among themselves, and that three other entities supplied the shares off-market and funded the buyers.

The officer found that noticees 1 to 11 breached Regulations 3 and 4 of the 2003 fraud and unfair trade practices regulations by trading among themselves to raise the price, and that noticees 16 to 18, who provided the shares and the funds, were part of the same scheme. The case against the company, its directors Sunil and Aditya Parakh, and one allottee was disposed of without penalty.

Penalties under section 15HA ranged from Rs 1,00,000 to Rs 3,00,000 per noticee: Rs 3,00,000 each on Prem Lata Nahar and Shyam Kanheyalal Vyas, Rs 2,00,000 each on three others including the three funding and supplying entities, and smaller sums on the rest, in total Rs 24,00,000. The officer noted that the noticees had already been debarred from the securities market for three years in a parallel order of June 2020, and that two of them had prior regulatory sanctions.

The record does not show a quantified gain or investor loss, which the officer said could not be computed, nor whether any penalty was paid or appealed. The order does not mention a criminal case.

This library tags the matter as price manipulation and 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 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.

• Price manipulation — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.
• Matched orders — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2022-06-29 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.