SEBI v. MBL & Company Ltd and Asiatic Portfolio Ltd (C Mahendra Exports, 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 two registered brokers pushed down the price of C Mahendra Exports in 2013-14 by repeatedly selling one to nine shares below the last traded price on BSE and NSE. Each was fined Rs 6 lakh, Rs 12 lakh in all.

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

1.2m 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 two noticees, MBL & Company Limited, trading on BSE, and Asiatic Portfolio Limited, trading on NSE, in the matter of C Mahendra Exports Limited, listed on both exchanges. Both were registered intermediaries during the relevant period. SEBI examined trading from 1 February 2013 to 22 October 2014, in three phases. The price fell in the second phase, which ran from 3 October 2013 to 30 July 2014.

SEBI alleged that the noticees caused the fall by repeatedly selling tiny quantities of between one and nine shares below the last traded price. It charged violations of section 12A of the SEBI Act and regulations 3 and 4 of the PFUTP Regulations 2003.

The officer found that MBL placed 1,085 such sell orders that added a negative movement of Rs 1,884.15 to the last traded price. MBL argued that these trades were only a small part of its volume (about 10 per cent was below the last price), but the officer held that even a single trade made with manipulative intent matters and relied on a Supreme Court decision of May 2022 affirming that single-share orders can manipulate a price. No connection with counterparties or the company was shown, but the officer held that was not necessary where the sellers placed small sell orders while larger buy orders were waiting.

Each noticee was fined Rs 6,00,000 under section 15HA, Rs 12,00,000 in all. The order notes that no gain or investor loss was quantified, that MBL had already been the subject of other orders for similar violations, and that Asiatic had surrendered its exchange memberships in 2014, which was treated as mitigating.

The record does not show whether the penalties were paid or appealed. 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.