SEBI v. Ritu Devi Khemka and others (Sai Television Ltd, family group, 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 May 2023 a SEBI executive director found that close relatives of Sai Television directors, with a proprietary firm, built artificial volume and distorted the price of the company's shares in 2001 and 2002 through reversed trades and off-market share transfers. Five of the seven noticees were barred from the market for three years; no penalty or disgorgement was ordered.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

—

Alleged gain

—

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

This final order was issued on 30 May 2023 by V. S. Sundaresan, an executive director of SEBI. It deals with seven related noticees, led by Ritu Devi (also Ms Ritu Devi Khemka) and her proprietary firm CRS Stocks and Securities, and relatives who included directors of Sai Television Ltd, a media company listed on NSE and two other exchanges. A separate order of the same date covers nine other noticees.

Sai Television's share price fell sharply in two periods, from 29 May to 7 September 2001 and from 25 February to 9 May 2002. SEBI investigated those periods and issued a common show cause notice in October 2015, under the PFUTP Regulations of 1995 read with those of 2003. The noticees withheld their PAN details and surnames, and the executive director traced them through public tax tribunal orders to show they were one family; the order discusses this at length and the Madras High Court had dismissed their earlier challenges in July 2021.

The order finds that in the first period Ritu Devi and her firm traded with each other through two brokers, with 51 structured deals in 25,700 shares in which buy and sell orders were less than 30 seconds apart and were reversed on the same days. In the second period the directors, their wives and relatives moved large blocks of shares off market to another noticee, Sajjan Kumar Nanwal, who sold them through brokers in dealings with connected counterparties, creating artificial volume. The order holds that the noticees acted in concert, distorted market equilibrium and committed price and volume manipulation.

The case against two of the seven, who were not shown to have a role in the manipulative trading, was not established. The other five, including Ritu Devi, her firm, Tirupathi Kumar Khemka, Champa Devi Khemka and Shivani Devi Khemka, were restrained from the securities market for three years. The investigation had not quantified the gains, so no disgorgement or monetary penalty was ordered.

The order is an administrative sanction, not a criminal judgment, and the record shows no criminal case. It does not show whether the noticees appealed to the Securities Appellate Tribunal, and the events concern 2001 and 2002, so the order was issued more than two decades afterwards.

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. 2023-05-30 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
• Order (PDF)

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.