SEBI v. Crosseas Capital Services Ltd (Wockhardt self-trades, 2023)

Dismissed

✓ 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.

Report an error in this record (sebi-74820-wash-trading-2023) by email

In July 2023 a SEBI adjudicating officer dropped proceedings against the broker Crosseas Capital Services over alleged self-trades in Wockhardt shares in 2012-13. The officer accepted that the trades were produced by algorithmic trading software and that no manipulative pattern had been alleged.

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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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

An adjudicating officer of SEBI decided this matter on 31 July 2023. The noticee is Crosseas Capital Services Ltd, a stock broker. The subject was trading in the scrip of Wockhardt Ltd between January 2012 and August 2013, which SEBI had examined for possible insider trading and fraudulent trade practices.

SEBI alleged that the broker, acting for its own proprietary account, repeatedly appeared on both sides of the same trade on NSE and BSE. The table in the notice counted 13,829 self-trades on NSE across 233 days and 22,199 on BSE across 246 days, equal to about 0.21 percent and 0.87 percent of market volume in those venues. SEBI said this created artificial volume and a misleading appearance of activity, breaching Regulations 3 and 4 of the PFUTP Regulations and the stock brokers' code of conduct.

The broker admitted the self-trades but said they were accidental results of its algorithmic trading software, were a tiny share of market volume, and fell under SEBI's own approach to unintended self-trades. It also pointed to an earlier order of a whole-time member in a parallel proceeding in the same matter that had disposed of the case without directions.

The adjudicating officer held that self-trades by an algo-trading broker cannot be attributed to the broker unless there is an allegation of price or volume manipulation or a wider fraudulent scheme. The notice alleged no such pattern, such as reversal trades or trading away from the last traded price. The allegations were therefore found not established, the broker was held not liable, the penalty questions were left unexamined, and the proceedings were disposed of with no penalty.

The record does not show whether SEBI appealed. No money was ordered, and no criminal case is mentioned.

This library tags the matter as wash 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.

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

Timeline

1. 2023-07-31 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

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.