SEBI v. P V Nageshwar Rao and others (Sai Television Ltd, trading network, 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 nine traders and firms took shares from the family of Sai Television directors and traded them among themselves through structured, near-simultaneous cross deals in 2002, creating artificial volume. Each was 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

—

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 is the companion to a same-day order against seven relatives of Sai Television Ltd's directors. It covers nine noticees: P V Nageshwar Rao, Sajjan Kumar Nanwal, R V Gurupadam, Siddhi Investments, Kanji Shares Consultancy Services, Rameshbhai Patel, Sudhirbhai Shah, Kuber Finstock Ltd and Airtel Maintenance and Marketing Consultant Pvt Ltd. Sai Television's shares traded only on NSE during the period.

SEBI's investigation covered 29 May to 7 September 2001 and 25 February to 9 May 2002, when the share price fell steeply. A common show cause notice of October 2015 alleged violations of the PFUTP Regulations of 1995 read with those of 2003. The order records that the noticees had a long procedural history, including arguments about delay, which the executive director rejected.

The order finds that shares moved off market from the directors' family and from other noticees to Mr Nanwal, who sold them through several brokers. It also finds that two clients of one broker executed 313 structured cross deals in 10 days from 11 April to 7 May 2002, amounting to about 3.12 per cent of market volume in that period, with buy and sell orders from zero seconds to a minute apart and many reversed in settlement. Related entities with common directors traded as counterparties, which created artificial volume.

The executive director held that the noticees acted together in a scheme that distorted market equilibrium through price and volume manipulation and operated as a fraud on investors. The violations found were of Regulation 4 of the 1995 PFUTP Regulations, in different sub-clauses for different noticees. Because the investigation did not quantify any gains, the sanction was a three-year bar from the securities market for every noticee, with pending settlements and open derivatives positions allowed to be wound down. There was no penalty and no disgorgement.

The order is an administrative sanction, not a criminal judgment. The record does not show whether any noticee appealed, and the events date to 2001 and 2002.

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.