SEBI v. Prashant Ashok Gamre and others (price manipulation by small buy orders, Zylog Systems, 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 February 2023 a SEBI adjudicating officer penalised three individuals Rs 5 lakh each, Rs 15 lakh in all, for lifting the last traded price of Zylog Systems Ltd shares with a large number of tiny buy orders in early 2012. A fourth noticee, a broker that sold in small lots, was cleared as an arbitrage trader.

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

1.5m 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

The order concerns trading in Zylog Systems Ltd shares on the BSE and NSE between November 2011 and March 2013. SEBI's allegations related to one phase from 17 January to 28 June 2012, when the price rose from about Rs 407 to Rs 663.80. Four noticees were named: Prashant Ashok Gamre, Hiten Chandrakant Bhai Parmar, Chetan Mukundrai Parekh and Nirshilp Securities Pvt Ltd.

SEBI alleged that the first three were the largest contributors to the rise in the last traded price, mostly by placing buy orders after the matching sell orders were already in the book, and many for between one and ten shares. The order records, for example, that Mr Gamre accounted for about 16 per cent of the positive price movement on the BSE and about 10 per cent on the NSE. Nirshilp was alleged to have sold in small lots in a way that pushed the price up.

The adjudicating officer found Mr Gamre, Mr Parmar and Mr Parekh liable under section 12A of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3 and 4 of the fraud-on-the-market rules, noting that Mr Parmar and Mr Parekh did not reply to the show cause notice or attend a hearing and that Mr Gamre did not reply or attend the final hearing. He cleared Nirshilp Securities, accepting that it traded on a pre-set algorithm to profit from price differences between the two exchanges, a strategy he said cannot be faulted.

The penalty was Rs 5 lakh each under section 15HA for the three, Rs 15 lakh in total, payable within 45 days. The officer said that no gain figure or investor loss figure was available, that no past violations appeared, and that SEBI had been slow to issue the notice. No market ban or disgorgement was imposed.

The record does not show appeals, payment, or the noticees' profits, and 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. 2023-02-08 SEBI adjudication 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.