SEBI v. Yatendra Kumar and others (Wockhardt insider trading, 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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On 31 July 2023 a SEBI adjudicating officer fined Wockhardt executive Yatendra Kumar Rs 12,00,000 for selling company shares after a US FDA inspection notice that was not yet public, and fined a colleague Rs 1,00,000 for breaching the company's trading code. A third employee was cleared of insider status.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

—

Penalty as published

1.3m 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

A SEBI adjudicating officer decided this matter on 31 July 2023. It concerns three employees of the pharmaceutical company Wockhardt Limited: Yatendra Kumar, Shashi Kant Tiwari and Girish Kumar Jain. SEBI had investigated trading in the scrip from January 2012 to August 2013, a period in which the price rose roughly sixfold and then fell after a US regulator import alert.

SEBI alleged that the US FDA issued an inspection observation (Form 483) on the company's Waluj factory on 22 March 2013, that this was unpublished price sensitive information until the company confirmed it on 15 April 2013, and that the three noticees, as employees, sold shares in that window or broke the company's code of conduct for designated employees.

The order finds that Mr Kumar, who supported the factory's product development and technology transfer and learned of the Form 483 on 22 March 2013, was a connected person and an insider who traded while holding the information; the order puts the loss he avoided at Rs 14,23,074. It found that Mr Tiwari and Mr Jain could not reasonably be expected to hold the information, since they worked in other units and were absent from the company's list of people who had it, so the insider-trading charge failed against them. Mr Kumar was also found to have traded without required pre-clearance and to have reversed a position within six months; Mr Tiwari was found to have reversed a position within six months, contrary to the company's code.

The officer imposed a penalty of Rs 10,00,000 on Mr Kumar for insider trading and Rs 2,00,000 for the code-of-conduct breaches, and Rs 1,00,000 on Mr Tiwari for the code breach, a total of Rs 13,00,000. Mr Jain received no penalty. The figure of Rs 14,23,074 is the loss avoided, not the penalty.

The order notes that a whole-time member, in a parallel proceeding in June 2023, directed Mr Kumar to disgorge that sum with interest and restrained him from the securities market for six months and from dealing in Wockhardt for one year; those directions are from the other order and are not imposed here. The record does not show appeals or any criminal case.

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. 2023-07-31 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.