SEBI v. Savita Satish Gowda and others (Sharon Bio-Medicine Ltd, misstated accounts, 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. 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 whole-time member found that four promoters and executives of Sharon Bio-Medicine overstated sales and purchases and mis-stated the company's accounts between 2011 and 2017, in breach of the anti-fraud rules. Each was barred from the market for three years and fined Rs 27 lakh, Rs 1.08 crore in total.

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

10.8m 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 final order was issued on 31 May 2023 by Ashwani Bhatia, a whole-time member of SEBI. The four noticees are Savita Satish Gowda, chairperson and managing director and a promoter of Sharon Bio-Medicine Ltd; Mohan P Kala, an executive director, promoter and chief financial officer; Lalit Misra, also an executive director, promoter and chief financial officer; and Vijay Kirpalani, a whole-time director.

The case arose after holders of the company's foreign currency convertible bonds filed an insolvency petition in March 2017, which the tribunal admitted in April 2017. A forensic audit of July 2014 to March 2017, with a further review of earlier trading parties, was followed by SEBI's investigation of July 2011 to March 2017. SEBI alleged that the company overstated trading sales and purchases, recorded fictitious transactions, did not report related-party dealings, and had governance failures such as audit committee meetings that were not held or did not scrutinise inter-corporate loans.

The order finds the allegations made out against all four and describes the first three as the decision makers in the manipulation of the accounts. It holds that the misrepresentation of the company's financials breached section 12A of the SEBI Act and the PFUTP Regulations, along with listing and disclosure rules and a securities-contracts provision. It records that the gain to the noticees and the investor loss could not be quantified and that the violations spanned multiple financial years.

Each noticee was restrained from the securities market and from holding director or key managerial positions in listed or SEBI-registered entities for three years, and may close out open derivatives positions within three working days. Each was fined Rs 20 lakh under section 15HA, Rs 5 lakh under section 15HB and Rs 2 lakh under the Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act, Rs 27 lakh per person and Rs 1.08 crore in total.

The order is an administrative sanction, not a criminal judgment, and the passages reviewed describe no criminal case. The record does not show whether the noticees appealed, whether the penalties were paid, or what happened to creditors in the insolvency process.

This library tags the matter as misleading issuer disclosure. 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.

• Misleading issuer disclosure — 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.