SEBI v. Ficus Securities Pvt Ltd and others (broker misuse of client funds and 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.
In October 2022 a SEBI adjudicating officer penalised the Delhi stockbroker Ficus Securities and its three directors a total of Rs 10 lakh after an inspection found that it had used about Rs 34.71 crore of client money and Rs 29.50 crore of client securities for its own purposes and moved Rs 6.26 crore to a sister company. Fraud-related provisions of the PFUTP Regulations were among those found breached.
The record
| Agency | SEBI (India) |
|---|---|
| Date filed | 2022-10-31 |
| Date resolved | 2022-10-31 |
| Court | SEBI adjudicating officer |
| Status | judgment |
| Asset class | equities |
| Instruments | clients' funds and securities held by a stockbroker |
| Venue | NSE, BSE, MSEI |
| Criminal parallel | No |
| Defendants | Ficus Securities Private Limited ; Vinod Kumar Bansal ; Neena Bansal ; Surender Singh |
| Techniques |
What was ordered
- Civil penalty
- —
- Disgorgement
- —
- Prejudgment interest
- —
- Total relief
- —
- Alleged gain
- —
- Penalty as published
- 1m INR
What is alleged to have happened
This adjudication order of 31 October 2022 was made by SEBI adjudicating officer N. Hariharan. The noticees are Ficus Securities Private Limited, a stockbroker registered with BSE, NSE and MSEI that has since been expelled and declared a defaulter by all three exchanges, and its directors Vinod Kumar Bansal, Neena Bansal and Surender Singh.
The case came out of a SEBI inspection on 23 January 2018 covering April 2015 to January 2018. SEBI alleged the broker failed to keep client money and securities apart from its own, with a client-funds shortfall of Rs 34.71 crore and Rs 29.50 crore of clients' securities not held in demat accounts as they should have been, transferred Rs 6.26 crore on a net basis to an associated company, left 327 investor complaints unresolved, did not run client accounts on the required settlement cycle and did not report depository account details to the exchanges.
The adjudicating officer held most of this proved. He found misuse of clients' funds and securities and transfers to the associate company, rejecting the claim that these were routine dealings between two clients of each other, because the associate had not traded at all during the period in which Rs 48.28 crore moved one way and Rs 48.94 crore the other. He held that these acts breached the broker code of conduct and Regulation 3(a) to (d) of the PFUTP Regulations as well as SEBI circulars. The allegation of non-submission of information to SEBI was not established.
The penalties total Rs 10 lakh, to be paid jointly and severally: Rs 1,00,000 under section 23D of the Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act for the non-segregation and misuse of client money and securities, Rs 5,00,000 under section 15HA for the misuse and the transfer to the associate, and Rs 1,00,000 each under sections 15C and 15HB of the SEBI Act for the other defaults. The officer treated a director's family health circumstances as mitigating. A separate whole time member order of 25 August 2022 had already barred the noticees from the securities market, and that order is not the subject of this record.
The record does not show whether any client was repaid, the final losses to clients, or any appeal.
No library technique matches misuse of client funds by a broker, so the technique list is empty.
This library tags the matter with no technique and records it as broker fraud on clients. 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
- 2022-10-31 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.