SEBI v. Arun Kochar and others (price manipulation, Wisec Global, 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 noticees in a 19-party case over the price of Wisec Global Ltd, a thinly traded BSE stock, in 2016 and 2017. Five main traders were fined Rs 5 to 10 lakh each for manipulative trades, and several parties were also fined for disclosure and summons failures.

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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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.

What is alleged to have happened

An adjudicating officer of SEBI issued this order on 30 June 2022 against 19 noticees in the matter of Wisec Global Limited, a company listed on BSE. SEBI investigated trading from September 2016 to June 2017, in which the price rose from Rs 5.96 to Rs 10.18 by December 2016 and again to over Rs 7 in mid-2017, against a smaller rise in the market index. The notice of 14 October 2021 covered several distinct sets of charges.

The central charge was that five noticees, led by Arun Kochar and Rahul Kumar, manipulated the price and created a misleading appearance of trading through small trades, first trades of the day and trades at new high prices, while others, including Ajmera Shares Trading and several individuals, created artificial volume. Further charges concerned disclosure under the takeover and insider trading rules, false descriptions of off-market share transfers as loans without any pledge, non-payment for transferred shares, and failure to answer SEBI summons. Two depository participants, Alankit Assignments and Arch Finance, were separately charged with weak due diligence on those transfers.

The officer found breaches of section 12A of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3 and 4 of the 2003 fraud and unfair trade practices regulations by the trading noticees, and penalised them under section 15HA at Rs 10,00,000 each on Arun Kochar, Rahul Kumar and Amit Mahesh Bhatt and Rs 5,00,000 each on most others, including Manohar lal Sachdeva, Ajay Gupta and Vishal Mahesh Waghela. Additional smaller sums of about Rs 1,00,000 were imposed for securities contracts act, summons and disclosure defaults, so that the highest individual total was Rs 13,00,000 for Mr Kochar.

A single overall total is not recorded here, because the order lists the penalties per noticee under different provisions and the dispositions for the depository participants and some other noticees are given in separate sections.

The record does not show whether any penalty was paid or appealed, the profit made, or any criminal case.

This library tags the matter as 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 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.

• Price manipulation — 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.