SEBI v. Pragyan Realty Pvt Ltd and others (Sunstar Realty price fall, 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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On 31 October 2022 a SEBI adjudicating officer penalised 21 companies and individuals Rs 5 lakh each, Rs 1.05 crore in total, for trading that the order finds pushed down the price of Sunstar Realty Development shares and inflated volume between June 2015 and March 2016. The order records that the investigation did not quantify any gain or investor loss.

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

10.5m 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

Sunstar Realty Development Ltd was listed on the SME segment of BSE in 2013. SEBI investigated the period 4 June 2015 to 31 March 2016, during which the share price fell from Rs 40.50 to a low of Rs 16.10 and closed the period at Rs 20.85, a fall of about 49 percent. The adjudicating officer's order of 31 October 2022 names 21 noticees: twelve private companies, and nine individuals who were directors of other connected companies or acted for them.

SEBI alleged that 37 entities, linked by common addresses, directors and fund transfers, formed a group, and that 31 of them traded as sellers in a way that drove the price down, including trades among themselves, some of them synchronised. It was said the group contributed a large negative share of the last traded price movement and a large share of volume, and that one individual, Atish Jaiswal, was the main person behind trades in four of the accounts. The charge was breach of section 12A of the SEBI Act and the fraud-prevention rules in the PFUTP Regulations.

The officer found that the 21 noticees were not acting as genuine traders, reasoning from the unusual pattern and frequency of their trades and the connections among them, and held that their trading was aimed at moving the price and creating artificial volume. The order accepts that the investigation did not establish any disproportionate gain or investor loss.

Each of the 21 noticees was penalised Rs 5 lakh under section 15HA of the SEBI Act, a total of Rs 1.05 crore, payable within 45 days.

The record does not show whether anyone appealed, why a group would want a price fall, or what trading profit or loss the group made, and the order does not address the other entities in the 37-entity group.

This library tags the matter as price manipulation and matched trades. 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 2 techniques 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.
• Matched orders — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2022-10-31 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.