SEBI v. Quasar India Ltd and others (misuse of preferential issue funds, 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 adjudicating officer on 10 October 2022 penalised Quasar India Ltd and three of its directors Rs 24 lakh in total for not using the Rs 5.10 crore raised in a 2014 preferential share issue for its stated objects. The order treats later shareholder ratification only as a mitigating factor.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

—

Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

2.4m 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

Quasar India Ltd, a company listed on BSE, allotted about 51 lakh shares at par to promoter and non-promoter entities on 31 January 2014, raising Rs 5.10 crore. BSE looked at how the money was used, and SEBI then investigated the period from September 2013, when the first subscription money arrived, to April 2014. The order was issued on 10 October 2022 against the company and three directors, Ankit Agarwal, Ganesh Prasad Gupta and Yogesh Bansal.

SEBI alleged that the company did not deploy the proceeds for the objects it had stated to the shareholders, and did so with its directors' knowledge. The bank trail examined in the order shows the money moving soon after receipt to a series of individuals and companies. The company also was alleged to have failed to disclose the deviation as the listing agreement required.

The officer found the fraud-prevention rules in the PFUTP Regulations and section 12A of the SEBI Act breached by the company and all three directors, and found the company in breach of the listing-agreement disclosure clause. The company had obtained shareholder ratification of the changed use only in January 2019, after BSE asked for it; the officer held that this did not cure the violation but counted it, and Mr Bansal's resignation within a year of the allotment, in reducing the penalties.

The penalties were Rs 5 lakh each on the company, Mr Agarwal and Mr Gupta under section 15HA, Rs 2 lakh on Mr Bansal, and for the company a further Rs 2 lakh and Rs 5 lakh under the securities contracts law for the disclosure failure, Rs 24 lakh in total.

The record does not show whether anyone appealed, whether the diverted money was recovered, or whether investors lost money; the order does not claim any trading gain or market effect.

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. 2022-10-10 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.