SEBI v. Sonal Vijay Mehta (Radha Madhav Corporation, 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 an individual lifted the price of Radha Madhav Corporation on BSE by placing hundreds of tiny market buy orders in late 2016, and imposed the minimum penalty of Rs 5 lakh, taking her lack of any proven link to counterparties into account.

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

500k 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 N. Hariharan of SEBI issued this order on 30 December 2022 against one noticee, Sonal Vijay Mehta, in the matter of Radha Madhav Corporation Limited, listed on BSE and NSE. SEBI had examined trading from 1 September 2016 to 28 February 2017, splitting it into two phases as the share price rose in both.

SEBI alleged that in the first phase, from 18 October to 21 November 2016, Ms Mehta manipulated the price on BSE by repeatedly buying one to ten shares at a price above the last traded price, creating a false appearance of trading. It charged violations of section 12A of the SEBI Act and regulations 3 and 4 of the PFUTP Regulations 2003.

The officer found that she executed 330 buy orders of minuscule size on BSE which made a substantial contribution to the positive movement in the last traded price, that she gave no justifiable reason, and that the trades were therefore not genuine. The investigation report credited her with adding about Rs 25 to the market's positive price movement through 363 trades against 99 counterparties.

The officer imposed the minimum penalty of Rs 5,00,000 under section 15HA, giving weight to mitigating facts: no connection had been shown between her and the counterparties, only four of the 99 counterparties were in the suspected group and they accounted for a small part of the price movement, and all 330 trades were market orders. No gain or investor loss was quantified, and no earlier proceedings against her were on record.

The record does not show whether the penalty was paid or appealed, or why she traded as she did. A separate order against another trader in the same stock appears elsewhere in this library. No criminal case is described.

This library tags the matter as price manipulation. 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.

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

Timeline

1. 2022-12-30 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.