SEBI v. Bharat Mohanlal Mehta and others (insider trading, Sharon Bio-Medicine, 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 June 2023 a SEBI whole-time member found that seven connected persons and companies sold Sharon Bio-Medicine shares in late 2014 and early 2015 with advance knowledge of a poor quarterly result, avoiding losses of about Rs 17.2 crore. All seven were barred from the market for three years and fined Rs 10 lakh each, and five must disgorge the avoided losses with interest.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

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Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

7m 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 22 June 2023 by Ashwani Bhatia, a whole-time member of SEBI. It names seven noticees: Bharat Mohanlal Mehta, his wife Lalita Bharat Mehta, three trading companies (Impressive Trading, Sovin Trading and Sunrath Trading), and Sachin Sudam Choudhary and Pankaj Kamlesh Chandola. The issuer is Sharon Bio-Medicine Ltd, a pharmaceutical company listed on BSE and NSE whose shares were suspended in 2019 under an insolvency resolution plan. The investigation period was 1 September 2014 to 15 February 2015.

The alleged inside information was the company's loss in its quarterly results for the period to December 2014, before they became public on 16 February 2015. The order says the price had fallen from about Rs 75 to about Rs 23 across the investigation period. It was alleged that Mr Mehta, a director of a company that shared Sharon's registered address and a trustee of a club where a Sharon promoter was a member, had access to the information, that his wife was an insider through him, and that the three trading companies were held by relatives of a Sharon promoter's family and did business with Sharon.

The order holds the insider-trading charge established under the old PIT Regulations of 1992, and sets out the notional losses avoided by selling before the news: Rs 8,08,596 for Mr Mehta, Rs 11,55,700 for Ms Mehta, Rs 7,19,07,236 for Impressive Trading, Rs 6,47,63,283 for Sovin Trading and Rs 3,34,08,563 for Sunrath Trading, a total of Rs 17,20,43,378. Mr Choudhary and Mr Chandola, linked to the companies, were also found liable but have no disgorgement figure.

The directions bar all seven from the securities market for three years, require the first five to disgorge the avoided losses with simple interest at 9 per cent a year from 16 February 2015, and impose a penalty of Rs 10 lakh on each under section 15G of the SEBI Act, a total of Rs 70 lakh.

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, whether sums were paid, or how the trading companies' ultimate owners are treated in other proceedings.

This library tags the matter as insider trading. 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.

• Insider trading — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2023-06-22 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.