SEBI v. Seacoast Shipping Services Ltd and others (false financial statements and fund diversion, 2025)

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. 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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A SEBI whole-time member found that Seacoast Shipping Services, a BSE-listed company, published misstated financial statements for FY 2020-21 to December 2023 while its promoters sold their stake. He ordered Manish Shah to disgorge about Rs 47.9 crore, imposed penalties of Rs 1.97 crore across 15 noticees and restrained the main noticees for five years.

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

19.7m 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 final order was issued on 24 September 2025 by a whole-time member of the Securities and Exchange Board of India. It follows an interim order and show cause notice of 30 September 2024. The 22 noticees were Seacoast Shipping Services Limited, a shipping and logistics company listed on the BSE since August 2019, its promoters Manish Shah and Sameer Shah, a group of preferential allottees, and directors, independent directors and compliance officers. An earlier stage of the matter went before the Securities Appellate Tribunal.

SEBI alleged that the company reported substantial sales but almost no fixed assets or inventory, that its financial statements were misrepresented, that shares were allotted fraudulently on a preferential basis, that rights issue and bank facility money was diverted, and that the board failed in corporate governance. It also alleged that the promoters then sold their shares to retail investors.

The order finds that more than 85 percent of the sales and more than 98 percent of the assets reported were not genuine across four reporting periods, and that the company and the two promoters were responsible. It upholds the fraudulent allotment of 1.50 crore shares to Manish Shah, which caused a loss of Rs 22.73 crore to the company, and the diversion of about Rs 43.42 crore of rights issue money and Rs 10.83 crore from a cash credit facility. It did not uphold the allotment charge against the other preferential allottees, whose interim directions were vacated, and it found directors and compliance officers liable for governance failures.

The sanctions are a five-year restraint on Seacoast fundraising and on Manish Shah and Sameer Shah dealing in securities, penalties of Rs 50 lakh each on the company and the two promoters and smaller penalties of Rs 3 lakh to Rs 8 lakh on twelve directors and officers, Rs 1.97 crore in all, and disgorgement by Manish Shah of Rs 47,89,87,587 with 12 percent annual interest. The company is directed to bring back the diverted money and reconstitute its audit committee. Proceedings against one noticee abated.

The record does not show whether any noticee appealed the final order, how much has been recovered, or the outcome of any criminal case. The order describes none.

This library tags the matter as misleading issuer disclosure. 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.

• Misleading issuer disclosure — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2025-09-24 SEBI 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.