SEBI v. Jasmine Piyush Karia and Piyush Vasantbhai Karia (front running, Quest Investment Advisors trades, 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 adjudicating officer fined a married couple a total of Rs 21.5 lakh for trading ahead of the portfolio manager Quest Investment Advisors, using advance information said to have come from a Quest dealer through his father. SEBI put their unlawful gains at Rs 6.34 lakh and Rs 4.42 lakh.

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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Penalty as published

2.2m 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 28 July 2022 against Jasmine Piyush Karia, a sub-broker at Magnum Equity Broking, and her husband Piyush Vasantbhai Karia, who acted on her behalf. SEBI investigated trading from March 2019 to July 2020 in the matter of front running the trades of Quest Investment Advisors Private Limited, a portfolio management firm. The show cause notice is dated 19 April 2022.

SEBI alleged that a Quest senior trader, Ketan Bhupendra Parekh, knew when Quest would place large buy or sell orders, and that his father, Bhupendra Parekh, a client of the couple's broking account, passed the instructions on so that trades were placed in the accounts of the father and of both noticees just ahead of Quest's orders. The connection was drawn from shared telephone numbers, addresses and an email address, and from the husband's calls with the father.

The officer found that Mr Karia was indirectly in possession of non-public information about Quest's impending orders and traded ahead of it in his own account and in those of Mr Parekh and Ms Karia, and that Ms Karia allowed her account to be used. The order says the intent was to profit and not to acquire the shares, so the trades were fraudulent, in breach of section 12A of the SEBI Act and the 2003 fraud and unfair trade practices regulations. It relies on a Tribunal decision and the Supreme Court's Kanaiyalal Baldevbhai Patel case on non-intermediary front running.

The penalties under section 15HA were Rs 12,68,244 on Ms Karia, set against unlawful gains of Rs 6,34,122, and Rs 8,84,377 on Mr Karia, set against gains of Rs 4,42,188.70, a total of Rs 21,52,621.

The order does not itself make findings against Ketan Bhupendra Parekh or Bhupendra Parekh, who are described as facilitators. The record does not show whether the penalties were paid or appealed, or any criminal case.

This library tags the matter as front running. 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.

• Front running — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2022-07-28 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.