SEBI v. Amish Arvind Malbari and others (Axis Bank WhatsApp messages, 2023)

Dismissed

✓ 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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In January 2023 a SEBI adjudicating officer closed, without any penalty, the case against eleven people accused of passing on or trading on Axis Bank's June 2017 quarterly results after the figures circulated on WhatsApp. The officer followed a tribunal ruling, left undisturbed by the Supreme Court, that cleared people in identical WhatsApp-leak cases.

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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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.

What is alleged to have happened

Adjudicating officer Sahil Malik of SEBI issued this order on 2 January 2023. It is one of a series of orders from a SEBI investigation that began after a November 2017 press report that unpublished company results had appeared in WhatsApp groups ahead of their official announcement. SEBI searched 26 entities and seized about 190 devices, and found that figures for around twelve companies had circulated, Axis Bank among them.

The information at issue was a short WhatsApp message listing Axis Bank's gross and net non-performing asset ratios, net interest margin, slippages, write-off and CASA ratio, which circulated before the bank announced its quarter-ended 30 June 2017 results on 25 July 2017 at about 16:23. SEBI treated the message as unpublished price sensitive information and anyone holding it as an insider. It alleged that Amish Malbari, Amrish Vakil, Fanil Motiwalla, Kunaal Khanna and Gaurav Dedhia forwarded it, in breach of section 12A of the SEBI Act and regulation 3(1) of the 2015 insider-trading regulations, and that Kotak Capital Partners, Hinglaj Enterprise, Nidhi Mehra, BharatKumar Bagrecha, Mita Shah and Roshan Saldanha traded in the stock while holding it, in breach of regulation 4(1).

The officer did not decide the merits. In identical matters, the Securities Appellate Tribunal on 22 March 2021 had found no violation, and the Supreme Court on 26 September 2022 declined to interfere with that ruling. Other adjudicating officers had dropped the similar WhatsApp cases for Mindtree, Bata, UltraTech, Infosys, TCS and ITC. The officer held that the present allegations could not be sustained on the same facts and that the trading charge, which depended on the five forwarders being insiders, fell with them.

The notice was disposed of against all eleven noticees without any monetary penalty and without examining their other submissions.

The record does not show whether the messages in fact came from anyone at Axis Bank, nor whether any noticee gained from trading. It does not show whether SEBI took any further step. 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. 2023-01-02 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.