SEBI v. Manish Jani (promoter exit through connected buyers, Layla Textiles and Traders, 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 March 2023 a SEBI adjudicating officer penalised Manish Jani, a promoter and director of Layla Textiles and Traders Ltd, Rs 5 lakh. The order found that he moved his shares to a company he was linked to, which sold them in structured trades to connected buyers, adding volume as he left the stock.

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

500k 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

Layla Textiles and Traders Ltd (LTTL) traded on the BSE. SEBI began looking at it after complaints that investors had received text messages recommending its purchase and that its price had suddenly risen and then fallen between 1 March and 9 May 2017, a period in which the price climbed from Rs 42.25 to Rs 69 before closing at Rs 35.05.

The noticee, Manish Jani, was a promoter and director of the company. SEBI found that on 17 April 2017 he became a director of Polpik Traders Pvt. Ltd and four days later moved 4,57,500 LTTL shares to it by off-market transfer. He resigned as LTTL's director on 5 May. Polpik sold the whole holding over three days at an average of about Rs 58.16, receiving about Rs 2.66 crore, which was 16.2 per cent of market volume on those days. Five connected entities, including Chandika Infrastructure and Realstep Agencies, took more than 90 per cent of what Polpik sold.

The adjudicating officer found that Mr Jani used Polpik as a conduit and placed buy and sell orders at nearly the same time with connected counterparties so that he could offload his shares at a high price, adding volume and lifting the price from about Rs 53 to Rs 59 on those days. She held that this gave a false and misleading appearance of trading and breached section 12A of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3 and 4(1) of the fraud-on-the-market rules, and called him the mastermind. Mr Jani said he was not involved in Polpik's trading decisions, which the officer rejected.

She observed that SEBI had given administrative warnings to three of the connected buyers, and that the other buyers and Polpik had been struck off the company register so no action was possible against them. She noted a Rs 10 lakh penalty against Mr Jani in July 2021 over another company. For this order she imposed a penalty of Rs 5 lakh under section 15HA, payable within 45 days.

The record does not show appeals, payment, or the source of the text messages. No disgorgement or market bar was ordered, and it describes no criminal case.

This library tags the matter as matched orders and 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 2 techniques 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.

• Matched orders — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.
• Price manipulation — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2023-03-16 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.