SEBI v. Harshal Vira and others (front running of a fund client, Reliance Securities dealers matter, 2023)

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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In January 2023 a SEBI whole-time member found that 14 people, including a chief and a senior dealer at Reliance Securities, front ran the derivatives orders of a Tata alternative investment fund scheme. He restrained them for four years, ordered disgorgement of about Rs 4.2 crore with 12 per cent interest, and imposed penalties totalling Rs 80 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

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

This is the main final order in SEBI's front running case involving dealers of Reliance Securities Ltd (RSL) and connected entities. Fifteen noticees were named, among them dealers Harshal Vira, Bhavesh Gandhi and Abhijeet Jain, Mr Vira's relatives, the Bagadia family accounts, Ketan Parekh, members of the Shah family, and Across Broking Pvt. Ltd. The alleged victim, called the Big Client in the order, was the Tata Absolute Return Fund, a scheme of a SEBI-registered alternative investment fund, which routed about 99 per cent of its trading value through RSL.

SEBI alleged that the three dealers saw the fund's orders before they reached the market and passed that information to people who traded ahead of it in the derivatives segment from accounts held by relatives and associates. It said the accounts followed a buy-buy-sell or sell-sell-buy pattern, placing orders just before the fund's orders and squaring off for profit. Surveillance alerts in December 2019 and January 2020 started the inquiry, an ex parte interim order followed in August 2020, and a show cause notice of May 2022 alleged breaches of section 12A of the SEBI Act and the fraud-on-the-market regulations. The notice put the front runners' wrongful gains at about Rs 4.26 crore.

The noticees denied the allegations in various ways, for example describing fund transfers as loans, phone contacts as exchange of market views, and trading as ordinary jobbing. The whole-time member rejected these answers for 14 of the 15 and held the front running charge made out. He disposed of the proceedings against the deputy dealer, Mr Abhijeet Jain, on the basis of an earlier paragraph of the order.

The directions restrain the 14 from accessing the securities market for four years, with time already served under the interim order set off. They require disgorgement of the front runners' gains with 12 per cent simple interest, amounting to about Rs 4.23 crore in total across eight accounts and shared jointly and severally among the information carriers and the account holders, with amounts already held in escrow to be credited. Each of the 14 was also penalised under section 15HA: Rs 10 lakh each for Mr Vira and Mr Gandhi and Rs 5 lakh for each of the other twelve, Rs 80 lakh in all, payable within 45 days.

The record does not show appeals, whether the penalties were paid, or the market effect on the fund. It describes no criminal case. Two other people tied to the same investigation settled separately; that outcome has its own record in this library.

This library tags the matter as front running. 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.

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

Timeline

1. 2023-01-30 SEBI final 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.