SEBI v. Naresh Ramniklal Mehta and Pallavi Naresh Mehta (Deepak Fertilizers, 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 found in December 2022 that a husband and wife with close links to Deepak Fertilizers' management bought its shares before the June 2020 quarterly results and sold after the announcement. They made about Rs 12.4 lakh and Rs 8.5 lakh and were fined Rs 25 lakh and Rs 20 lakh.

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

4.5m 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

Adjudicating officer Amit Kapoor of SEBI issued this order on 22 December 2022. The noticees were Naresh Ramniklal Mehta and his wife Pallavi Naresh Mehta, and the company was Deepak Fertilizers and Petrochemicals Corporation Limited. The period under investigation was 1 June to 30 September 2020.

The information at issue was the company's financial results for the quarter ended 30 June 2020, which the board approved and the company announced on 31 July 2020. SEBI alleged that the couple, as insiders, traded on this unpublished price sensitive information in breach of sections 12A(d) and (e) of the SEBI Act and regulations 3(2) and 4(1) of the PIT Regulations 2015.

The officer found the couple to be connected persons: Mr Mehta was a cousin of the company's chairman and managing director, a director of a firm providing business services to the company and its subsidiaries, and in frequent phone contact with its key officials according to call records; Ms Mehta was a director in that firm and in two of the company's subsidiaries. The order accepts that the call records do not prove the information was passed in particular calls, but holds on a balance of probabilities that the couple had access to it. They bought shares only in the period before the announcement and sold nearly all of them after it; their trading otherwise was only in this stock.

The order puts Mr Mehta's actual profit at about Rs 12.40 lakh on 60,550 shares and Ms Mehta's at about Rs 8.50 lakh on 16,575 shares. Under section 15G the officer imposed Rs 25,00,000 on Mr Mehta and Rs 20,00,000 on Ms Mehta, Rs 45,00,000 in all, noting no loss to investors could be quantified and no prior violations were on record.

The record does not show whether the penalties were paid or appealed, and the order does not direct disgorgement of the profits. It does not show how the information in fact reached the couple, and no criminal case is described.

This library tags the matter as insider trading. 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.

• Insider trading — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2022-12-22 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.