SEBI v. Shreenath Finstock Private Limited and others (one-share buy orders, Nutraplus India, 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 whole-time member found that three buyers repeatedly bought single shares of Nutraplus India Ltd to lift the price, which let three preferential allottees sell at inflated levels. All six were restrained from the market for a year and the three sellers were told to disgorge about Rs 13.7 lakh with interest.

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

Nutraplus India Ltd is listed on the BSE. SEBI examined trading in its shares from January 2015 to July 2017, a period in which the Sensex rose about 18 per cent but the share price fell by about 43 per cent overall, and divided it into four price phases. The notice named six noticees: Shreenath Finstock Private Limited, Bhavin Sureshbhai Thakkar and Gedalia Multitrading Private Limited as the buyers, and Bishal Narain Mittal HUF, Anchal Kishor Ostwal and Yogita Manoj Mittal as the sellers.

SEBI's allegation was that the first three, who were the top three traders in the stock on both sides, bought one share at a time on thousands of occasions even though larger sell orders were already available in the market. This, it said, created and sustained the last traded price and helped set new highs, enabling the other three, who held shares from a preferential allotment, to sell at inflated prices. According to the order, the three buyers bought 2,85,317 shares from the three sellers.

The whole-time member accepted that buying a single share is not manipulative in itself but held that this pattern was. The three buyers bought single shares on 8,708 occasions when larger sell orders were available, which he said cannot be explained by ordinary buying behaviour, and the trades produced a windfall for the sellers. He found that all six had violated the fraud-on-the-market regulations.

All six are restrained from the securities market for one year. The three sellers must disgorge unlawful profits of Rs 5,15,240.91, Rs 4,14,708.60 and Rs 4,41,175.84, a total of about Rs 13.7 lakh, with simple interest at 9 per cent a year from 27 July 2017 to the Investor Protection and Education Fund within 45 days, and must give SEBI an asset inventory. The order imposes no monetary penalty.

The record does not show appeals, payment, or whether the buyers and sellers were acting in concert beyond the pattern the order describes. 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. 2023-02-28 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.