SEBI v. Do Max Steel Ltd. and others (price manipulation, Kelvin Fincap, 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 imposed penalties on 115 noticees, in individual amounts from Rs 25,000 to Rs 5 lakh and Rs 1.16 crore in total, for manipulating the price of Kelvin Fincap Limited between 2011 and 2014. The order finds some noticees pushed the price up with tiny sell orders and a larger group traded among themselves.

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

11.6m 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 30 June 2022 against 115 noticees in the matter of Kelvin Fincap Limited, formerly Dahyabhai Sons Limited, listed on BSE. SEBI investigated trading from November 2011 to May 2014 after a sharp rise in price and volume, and had restrained 44 entities in an interim order of August 2014. The lead names in the order are Do Max Steel Limited, Cromakem Limited and Zimig Trading Company Private Limited, and 112 more are covered.

SEBI alleged that in a first phase seven noticees contributed about 90 percent of the positive movement in the last traded price by repeatedly selling tiny quantities, mostly single shares, over 121 trading days, often without delivering the shares. In a third phase, from July 2013 to May 2014, the price rose from Rs 118 to Rs 535, and SEBI said a connected group traded among themselves, with buyers and sellers together accounting for about 41.5 percent of the market's positive new high price contribution.

The order holds that the connected noticees were instrumental in artificially inflating the price, created a misleading appearance of trading, and so violated section 12A of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3 and 4 of the 2003 fraud and unfair trade practices regulations. The officer set penalties according to each noticee's role and treated the lapse of time since 2011 to 2014 as mitigating.

Penalties under section 15HA ranged from Rs 25,000 to Rs 5,00,000 for each noticee and total Rs 1,16,00,000 for all 115. Examples are Rs 3,00,000 each on Do Max Steel and Cromakem, and Rs 5,00,000 on Suryamangal Media Entertainment, Maruti Shankar Gaude and Vidyadhar Ramnaresh Dubey. They are payable within 45 days.

The record does not show gains or investor losses, which the officer said could not be computed, nor whether the penalties were 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. 2022-06-30 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.