SEBI v. Sushma Agarwal (price manipulation, Winsome Yarns, 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 July 2022 a SEBI whole-time member set aside an adjudicating officer's 2020 discharge of Sushma Agarwal and fined her Rs 1,00,000 for placing 353 small buy orders above the last traded price in Winsome Yarns shares. A parallel order had already barred her from the market for four years.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

100k 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

A whole-time member of SEBI issued this order on 22 July 2022 under section 15-I(3) of the SEBI Act, which allows review of an adjudicating officer's order. It concerns Sushma Agarwal and trading in Winsome Yarns Ltd on BSE and NSE between September 2010 and February 2015.

SEBI's investigation alleged that she placed 353 trades that were not normal and lifted the price of the shares. In February 2020 an adjudicating officer discharged her, relying on a Securities Appellate Tribunal ruling in the Nishith M Shah HUF case and noting that no connection was shown between buyers and sellers. SEBI then issued a review notice of 23 April 2020 saying that the discharge was erroneous and that the officer had not decided the case on its merits.

The review order finds that she repeatedly placed buy orders above the last traded price and each time bought just one share even though large sell orders were pending, which it says is not how a prudent investor would trade. It accepts none of her explanation of lack of financial literacy and holds the trades produced an artificial contribution to the price rise, in breach of Regulations 3 and 4 of the 2003 fraud and unfair trade practices regulations. It therefore sets aside the earlier discharge.

The penalty is Rs 1,00,000 under section 15HA, set low because of the four-year market bar already imposed on her in a separate proceeding, and because no profit or loss to investors was quantified and no similar violation in another scrip was found.

The record does not show whether the penalty was paid or whether she appealed the review order. The order does not mention a 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. 2022-07-22 SEBI order under section 15-I(3)

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.