SEBI v. F6 Finserve Pvt. Ltd. and others (broker pledging client securities, 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.
A SEBI adjudicating officer penalised a Gurgaon stock broker and four individuals named Goel in October 2022 for misusing clients' securities and funds, including pledging the securities of 1,116 clients to raise loans. Four nominal directors, who said they had become directors in settlement of a debt, were cleared.
The record
| Agency | SEBI (India) |
|---|---|
| Date filed | 2022-10-18 |
| Date resolved | 2022-10-18 |
| Court | SEBI adjudicating officer |
| Status | judgment |
| Asset class | equities |
| Venue | NSE, BSE |
| Criminal parallel | No |
| Defendants | F6 Finserve Pvt. Ltd. ; Pankaj Goel ; Meenu Goel ; Deepak Goel ; Ruchika Goel ; Praveen Sharma ; Asha Sharma ; Sanjay Anand ; Kavita Anand |
| Techniques |
What was ordered
- Civil penalty
- —
- Disgorgement
- —
- Prejudgment interest
- —
- Total relief
- —
- Alleged gain
- —
What is alleged to have happened
A SEBI adjudicating officer in Mumbai decided this matter on 18 October 2022. The first noticee is F6 Finserve Pvt. Ltd., a SEBI-registered stock broker on NSE and BSE with its office in Gurgaon. The other eight noticees were Pankaj Goel, who is described in the replies as its managing director, three others sharing his surname, and four people who held directorships.
SEBI inspected the broker in August 2017 for the period April 2015 to July 2017. The show cause notice alleged failure to settle funds and securities of inactive clients, failure to segregate and misuse of client funds and securities, wrong margin reporting, unredressed complaints (288 complaints worth about Rs 41.9 crore were pending), failure to supply information, and fraud under section 12A of the SEBI Act and PFUTP Regulations 3(a) to (d) by pledging client securities with lenders to obtain overdrafts. Pledged holdings peaked at about Rs 47.5 crore on one day in August 2015.
The broker did not reply to the inspection findings. Some other noticees alleged that Mr Pankaj Goel had defrauded them and filed police complaints. The order finds that the broker pledged the securities of 1,116 clients, held in a fiduciary capacity, for its own borrowing, and that it breached the client-asset circulars, the margin reporting rules and the redressal rules.
It holds the broker, Pankaj Goel, Meenu Goel, Deepak Goel and Ruchika Goel liable, including for violating section 12A and the PFUTP Regulations. The two couples named as Sharma and Anand were held not liable: the officer accepted that they became directors only because Mr Goel offered them directorships in place of repaying money he owed them, so they were more like creditors.
Penalties were imposed under five penalty provisions covering information failures, grievance redressal, fraud, intermediary breaches and the securities-contracts law: Rs 89 lakh on the broker and Rs 1.24 crore on each of two joint pairs of the Goel noticees, with Rs 35 lakh to Rs 50 lakh of each being the section 15HA fraud penalty. The order's table is hard to read and the record here does not give a single clean total.
The record does not show whether the penalties were paid or appealed, or whether police cases against Mr Goel went further.
This library tags the matter as broker misuse of client securities (pledging), with no more specific library technique. 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
- 2022-10-18 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.