SEBI v. Hasti Finance Ltd. and others (funded preferential allotment, 2022)

Judgment entered

Checked against the primary document on October 9, 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.

Report an error in this record (sebi-61297-market-abuse-2022) by email

In July 2022 a SEBI adjudicating officer imposed a single Rs 15,00,000 penalty, shared jointly and severally by 21 noticees, in the Hasti Finance case. The order finds that the company and its directors funded the allottees of a 2011 preferential issue through affiliated courier companies, giving a false impression of capital infusion.

The record

Structured fields for this action, as recorded in our case library.
Agency	SEBI (India)
Date filed	2022-07-28
Date resolved	2022-07-28
Court	SEBI adjudicating officer
Status	judgment
Asset class	equities
Instruments	Hasti Finance Ltd. warrants and shares (January 2011 preferential allotment)
Criminal parallel	No
Defendants	Hasti Finance Ltd. (entity) ; Chandrakant Baburao Tupe (individual) ; Nitin Prabhudas Somani (individual) ; Sonal Somani (individual) ; Salim Ismail Shaikh (individual) ; Lucky Manoj Somani (individual) ; Blue Sky Courier and Cargo Pvt. Ltd. (entity) ; Abbas Khan Chand Khan (individual) ; Pankaj Kumar Shiv Singh (individual) ; Vinod Ramgahan Sharma (individual) ; Vijay Surendraprasad Singh (individual) ; Satish Kumar (individual)
Techniques

What was ordered

Civil penalty: —
Disgorgement: —
Prejudgment interest: —
Total relief: —
Alleged gain: —
Penalty as published: 1.5m 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

The order of 28 July 2022 covers 22 noticees in SEBI's inquiry into the January 2011 preferential allotment by Hasti Finance Ltd., for the period August 2010 to August 2015. They are the company, four directors, twelve preferential allottees and five affiliated courier and logistics companies. Only 12 are named in this record; the remaining ten include other allottees and the other four affiliated companies.

SEBI alleged that the company funded the allottees' payment for warrants and for the conversion into shares, routed the money through the affiliated entities, and had them forward the funds on to related firms, instead of using the proceeds for the purposes approved by shareholders. It charged fraud under section 12A of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3(a) to (d) and 4(1) of the PFUTP Regulations.

The adjudicating officer found that apart from one allottee, Abhilasha Rathi, who was held not liable, the company, its directors, the conduit entities and the allottees were part of a scheme that gave an illusory impression of genuine capital infusion. He found that the money was used to create fixed deposits, which were later closed and passed to associated entities without documentary support.

The penalty is a single sum of Rs 15,00,000 payable jointly and severally by noticees 1 to 8 and 10 to 22. The officer treated the passage of time since 2011, the small number and value of the shares, the company's closed business after the pandemic and a late open offer as mitigating factors. No gain or investor loss was quantified.

The record does not show whether the penalty was paid or appealed, how it was apportioned among the noticees, or what the shares later traded at. Because the amount is shared among many parties, it is small per person.

This library tags the matter as no specific technique, because the finding is a funded preferential allotment rather than one of the library's trading methods. 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.

Timeline

2022-07-28 SEBI adjudication order (28 July 2022)

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

The linked release is published by the issuing regulator under its own terms. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Record added October 8, 2026. submit a correction.