SEBI v. Faithful Cloth Merchants Pvt. Ltd. and others (Appu Marketing and Manufacturing Ltd, 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 adjudicating officer found that three companies pushed up the price of Appu Marketing and Manufacturing shares by placing small buy orders above the last traded price at regular intervals between 2014 and 2015. Each was fined Rs 10 lakh, Rs 30 lakh in all.

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

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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

This adjudication order was issued on 31 May 2023 by G. Ramar, a SEBI adjudicating officer. The noticees are Faithful Cloth Merchants Pvt. Ltd., Fastner Machinery Dealers Pvt. Ltd. and Anurodh Infrastructure Limited. The shares concerned are those of Appu Marketing and Manufacturing Ltd, now known as Ejecta Marketing Ltd. The investigation period ran from 19 September 2014 to 23 December 2015.

SEBI noticed abnormal price movement in the stock and found a group of entities, connected with each other or with the company, trading in small quantities at regular intervals and mostly above the last traded price. Its show cause notice alleged that the three noticees contributed significantly to positive and negative price movement and thereby breached section 12A of the SEBI Act and the PFUTP Regulations, including provisions on creating a false appearance of trading and manipulating price.

According to the order, the suspected group accounted for about half of the market's positive last-traded-price movement, and the three noticees alone accounted for about 48 per cent of it and about 40 per cent of the market's new-high-price contribution. Almost all of their price-raising trades were against counterparties outside the group, so the order treats the pattern as one of pushing the price up with small orders rather than trading with each other. The adjudicating officer held the allegations established.

Each of the three companies was fined Rs 10 lakh under section 15HA of the SEBI Act, a total of Rs 30 lakh, payable within 45 days. No market bar or disgorgement was ordered.

The order is an administrative penalty, not a criminal judgment, and the record shows no criminal case. It does not show who ultimately controlled the three companies, what they gained, whether they appealed, or whether the penalties were paid.

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. 2023-05-31 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.