SEBI v. Anil Kumar Dhawan (Kassa Finvest client securities, 2023)
Judgment entered
Checked against the primary document on October 9, 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.
On 28 June 2023 a SEBI adjudicating officer, acting after a tribunal remand, imposed the Rs 5 lakh minimum penalty on Anil Kumar Dhawan, an operations vice-president of the broker Kassa Finvest, for fraud-related breaches over the sale and pledging of clients' securities.
The record
| Agency | SEBI (India) |
|---|---|
| Date filed | 2023-06-28 |
| Date resolved | 2023-06-28 |
| Court | SEBI adjudicating officer |
| Status | judgment |
| Asset class | equities, mutual funds |
| Instruments | client securities and mutual fund units held by Kassa Finvest |
| Criminal parallel | No |
| Defendants | Anil Kumar Dhawan |
| Techniques |
What was ordered
- Civil penalty
- —
- Disgorgement
- —
- Prejudgment interest
- —
- Total relief
- —
- Alleged gain
- —
- Penalty as published
- 500k INR
What is alleged to have happened
This adjudication order was issued on 28 June 2023 by SEBI adjudicating officer Soma Majumder. The sole noticee is Anil Kumar Dhawan, who was a vice-president (operations) and handled business development at Kassa Finvest Private Limited, a SEBI-registered stockbroker. He was an employee, not a director or promoter.
SEBI had received client complaints in 2014 about delays in paying out funds and securities, and alleged that the broker had raised money by selling and pledging clients' securities, with the funds used for the firm's expansion and for group entities. An investigation was ordered in 2015 and an adjudication order imposed penalties in February 2021. The Securities Appellate Tribunal set that order aside as to Mr Dhawan in April 2023 because he had never been served with the show cause notice, and sent the matter back, leading to this fresh order.
The notice charged him under Regulations 3 and 4 of the PFUTP Regulations 2003. He argued that he was a subordinate with no authority to sign for the firm, that he left in July 2014 over unpaid salary, and that an earlier tribunal decision treated ordinary employees differently from officers responsible for compliance. The order records the account movements showing client securities and fund units moving to the broker's own account and being sold or pledged, and holds the charges established against him.
In fixing the penalty the officer found no quantified gain or loss and no repetition, and treated as mitigating that he was only an employee and had already been barred from the securities market for ten years by a 2017 order. She imposed the minimum penalty of Rs 5 lakh under section 15HA, payable within 45 days.
The record does not show how much clients lost, what the broker's directors were ordered to pay in the main case, or whether this order was appealed.
This library does not assign a technique tag to the matter, because no technique in the library fits the conduct. 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.
Timeline
- 2023-06-28 SEBI adjudication order on remand
Primary documents
Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.