SEBI v. Balram Agarwal and others (price manipulation allegation, A.F. Enterprises, 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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A SEBI adjudicating officer ended a case in January 2023 against three buyers of A.F. Enterprises Ltd shares without imposing any penalty. SEBI had alleged that their small buy orders at above the last price pushed up an illiquid stock, but the officer found no evidence of collusion with the sellers.

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

A.F. Enterprises Ltd was listed on the BSE on 23 May 2014. SEBI investigated trading from that date to 29 April 2015, a period in which the share price rose from Rs 255 to a high of Rs 648 and was later trading at under Rs 20. The three noticees were Balram Agarwal, Ashish Bansal and Naresh Kumar Bansal.

The show cause notice of November 2022 said the stock was highly illiquid and that, in the first phase, its price climbed from about Rs 257 to Rs 451 in only 14 trading days on very small volume. It said the noticees bought at prices above the last traded price and supplied a significant share of the positive price movement, 22.67 per cent for Mr Agarwal, 9.7 per cent for Mr Bansal and 2.56 per cent for Mr Naresh Kumar Bansal. It added that Mr Bansal was the husband of a director of the company and of its promoter company and that his co-noticee was her father.

The adjudicating officer, relying on several Securities Appellate Tribunal rulings, held that the charge of artificially raising a price needs evidence of collusion between buyer and seller. The investigation had found no link between the noticees and their counterparties, and the main counterparty was not connected to them or the promoters. The orders were placed when no sell orders were pending, time gaps between buy and sell were large, and there was no sign of synchronised, circular, reversal or self trades. The noticees had held the shares for a long time and sold at a loss, and their seven trades in 222 shares were under 15 per cent of the 55 trades in the period.

He concluded that manipulation and a misleading appearance of trading were not established, and disposed of the proceedings under section 15HA without any monetary penalty.

This record is a dismissal. It does not show whether SEBI appealed, and no proceedings against the counterparties appear in it. It describes no criminal case.

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. 2023-01-31 SEBI adjudication order disposing of the notice without penalty

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.