SEBI v. ARG Management Solutions Pvt Ltd (single-share buy orders, Nutraplus India, 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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A SEBI whole-time member reviewed an adjudicating officer's order that had let ARG Management Solutions off, found that its 4,000 single-share buy trades in Nutraplus India shares had manipulated the price, and fined it Rs 10 lakh. The order was passed under SEBI's power to revise orders it considers erroneous.

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

1m 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 was issued on 27 September 2022 by a whole-time member of the Securities and Exchange Board of India under section 15-I(3) of the SEBI Act. The noticee was ARG Management Solutions Pvt Ltd. SEBI's investigation of Nutraplus India Ltd covered 1 January 2015 to 27 July 2017.

SEBI alleged that the noticee placed buy orders for a single share on 4,000 occasions, which contributed Rs 4,228.90, or 17.56 percent, of the Rs 24,086.60 positive movement in the last traded price in the price-rise period to February 2016. An adjudicating officer had on 31 March 2020 found the charges not established, reasoning among other things that the noticee's net contribution was only Rs 2,798.20 after offsetting trades and that no connection to counterparties or the company had been shown.

The whole-time member disagreed. Relying on a Securities Appellate Tribunal ruling that trades can be manipulative even without a proven link between buyer and seller, he found that the 4,000 incremental-price single-share buys moved the price and created a misleading appearance of trading, breaching section 12A and Regulations 3 and 4 of the PFUTP Regulations. He held the earlier exoneration erroneous and not in the interest of the securities market.

He imposed a penalty of Rs 10 lakh under section 15HA, payable within 45 days.

The record does not show whether the noticee appealed the penalty, or the profit made. It describes no criminal case. The other noticees from the original proceedings are not covered by this order.

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. 2022-09-27 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.