SEBI v. Harsha Jagdishbhai Parmar and others (Darshan Orna circular trades and funding, 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 decided in December 2022 that 15 accounts ran loops of circular trades in Darshan Orna shares on three days in January 2019, timed with a bulk-SMS campaign, and that 14 entities funded the accounts used to buy before the tips went out. A joint penalty of Rs 7.5 lakh and another of Rs 10 lakh were imposed, and the case against four other noticees was not established.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

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Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

1.8m 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 Maninder Cheema of SEBI issued this order on 28 December 2022 against 33 noticees in the matter of Darshan Orna Limited. It is the adjudication counterpart of a final order of 19 December 2022 against Hanif Shekh and a group of front accounts, who were behind bulk SMS buy tips in January 2019. The noticees here were other traders, a broker and companies, first among them Vividoffset Printers (now Vivid Mercantile), Veeram Vendors, Pinalben Shah and Shashwat Stock Brokers.

SEBI alleged three things. Noticees 1 to 4 were said to have done three synchronised trades in 2018, from the broker's office. Noticees 5 to 19 were said to have traded circularly among themselves on 7, 8 and 9 January 2019, creating a false appearance of volume. Noticees 20 to 33 were said to have funded the accounts used to buy shares ahead of the SMS campaign.

The officer found the case against the first four not established: the early trades predated the SMS scheme and no link to it or to Hanif Shekh was shown, and one buyer had matched existing sell orders. For noticees 5 to 19 the officer found circular trading in concentrated bursts, with orders placed seconds apart and positions squared off by the end of each day. For example, a broker-noticee had traded about 34,000 shares on those three days, 28,325 of them in circular loops, with no change of beneficial ownership. Several accounts were found to have been operated by one noticee, and others that did not reply were treated as mule accounts. The funders were found to have routed money, including about Rs 85.67 lakh to four accounts, so the shares were bought ahead of the SMS campaign and sold later. The loan explanations given were rejected.

Under section 15HA the officer imposed Rs 7,50,000 jointly and severally on noticees 5 to 19, and Rs 10,00,000 jointly and severally on noticees 20 to 33, which sums to Rs 17,50,000. No gain or loss was quantified.

The record does not show whether anything was paid or appealed. No criminal case is described.

This library tags the matter as matched orders and a pump and dump. 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.

• Matched orders — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.
• Pump and dump — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2022-12-28 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.