SEBI v. Beeline Broking Limited and others (market maker price manipulation, Transwind Infrastructure, 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 12 related people and entities Rs 30 lakh jointly and severally over the rise in Transwind Infrastructure Ltd shares on NSE's SME platform in mid-2020. The order found the stock's market maker orchestrated matched trades with connected parties that inflated the price, while buy tips circulated on Telegram.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

3m 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

Transwind Infrastructure Ltd listed on NSE's SME platform, Emerge, in July 2017, with Beeline Broking Limited as its market maker until July 2020. SEBI began investigating after unsolicited messages on a Telegram channel recommended buying the stock. Between 3 June and 9 July 2020 the price rose from Rs 4.05 to Rs 12.30, and average daily volume jumped from about 6,000 shares to about 1.14 lakh in the weeks after the messages began.

SEBI named 14 noticees, with the broker alleged to have breached the stock broker rules and the fraud-on-the-market regulations and the others alleged to have breached the fraud provisions of the SEBI Act and regulations. The allegations were that Beeline, its connected clients and relatives, and an associate company, Elite Accfin Solutions, traded among themselves in an illiquid stock, with the broker placing orders for its own clients or clients of the issue's merchant banker on one side and its own orders on the other. SEBI said this lifted the last traded price on trade after trade and that the connected entities then sold into the inflated price.

The adjudicating officer concluded that the scheme was orchestrated by the market maker, that Elite Accfin acted in tandem with it because most manipulative trades were between those two, and that the other noticees acted on instructions. He held the violations established against twelve noticees, and found the charges against two individuals, a father-and-son pair trade and a cousin of a director of a related company, not established. He set aside SEBI's calculation of a Rs 34.25 lakh profit for five sellers, noting that some bought at Rs 27 in the offer and so lost money.

He imposed Rs 30 lakh in total under sections 15HA and 15HB, payable jointly and severally by the twelve, taking into account that NSE had already penalised Beeline Rs 10 lakh for the same conduct. There was no market bar or disgorgement.

The record does not show appeals, payment, or who wrote the Telegram messages. It describes no criminal case.

This library tags the matter as price manipulation and matched orders. 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.

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

Timeline

1. 2023-03-31 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.