SEBI v. SRBC & Co. LLP and others (insider trading, Infibeam Avenues, 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In June 2022 a SEBI adjudicating officer penalised audit firm SRBC & Co. LLP Rs 10 lakh for communicating unpublished price sensitive information about Infibeam Avenues Limited, and one of its employees Rs 1 lakh for trading in breach of the pre-clearance rules. Charges against three other noticees were not established.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

—

Penalty as published

1.1m 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 in the matter of Infibeam Avenues Limited, listed on BSE and NSE. SEBI investigated trading from August 2016 to June 2017 after the company said that one of its joint statutory auditors, SRBC & Co. LLP, had shared unpublished price sensitive information about its financial results. Five noticees were named: the audit firm, Shamsuddin Valani, Sejal Shokataly Pirani, Rachit Shrenikbhai Jhaveri and Vijeet Kothari.

SEBI alleged that the firm's staff forwarded financial results to personal email addresses and, in one case, to an address belonging to another client of the firm, and that the firm thereby communicated price sensitive information in breach of section 12A(e) of the SEBI Act and Regulation 3(1) of the Prohibition of Insider Trading Regulations, 2015. It further alleged that an individual who received the information, Ms Pirani, traded on it, and that Mr Jhaveri, an assistant manager at the firm, traded in the stock while in possession of price sensitive information without the required pre-clearance.

The order finds the firm liable for the communication, treating the sharing as inadvertent and noting that no trades were shown to follow from it. It finds Mr Jhaveri breached the code-of-conduct clauses, having traded on 9 February 2017 and made a profit of about Rs 1,033. It holds the allegations against Mr Valani, Ms Pirani and Mr Kothari not established, because the evidence did not show that Ms Pirani was an insider or had procured the information.

SRBC & Co. LLP was penalised Rs 10,00,000 under section 15G(ii) of the SEBI Act and Mr Jhaveri Rs 1,00,000 under section 15HB, together Rs 11,00,000, payable within 45 days.

The record does not show whether either penalty was paid or appealed. It also does not resolve the audit firm's argument that the company singled it out after it questioned the company's accounts, which the order records but does not adopt.

This library tags the matter as insider trading. 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.

• Insider trading — 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.