SEBI v. Haresh Jashnani and others (United Spirits options, adjudication remand, 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.

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On 25 August 2023 a SEBI adjudicating officer, re-hearing the case after the Securities Appellate Tribunal set aside her predecessor's 2020 penalties of about Rs 3.06 crore, disposed of the insider trading charges against three members of the Jashnani family. The trading looked suspicious, but there was no evidence that anyone told them of Diageo's open offer.

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

A SEBI adjudicating officer decided this matter on 25 August 2023, after the Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) set aside earlier adjudication orders of 30 June 2020 and sent the case back in November 2022. Those orders had imposed penalties of Rs 93,24,057 on Haresh Jashnani, Rs 1,31,92,893 on Poonam Jashnani and Rs 80,76,375 on Varun Jashnani. The matter concerns stock options in United Spirits Limited traded on NSE in early 2014.

SEBI alleged that the announcement on 15 April 2014 of Diageo's open offer for up to 26 percent of United Spirits at Rs 3,030 a share was unpublished price sensitive information from 12 March 2014. It said a Diageo executive, Nishat Gupte, a member of the deal team, was the son-in-law of Haresh and Poonam Jashnani and brother-in-law of Varun, passed it on, and the three traded in Rs 2,700 to 2,900 call options just before the announcement, with profits flowing indirectly to his wife.

The order accepted that the trading was highly suspicious. The noticees concentrated on this stock's options, traded close to the information period, and bought out-of-the-money calls while the share price fell. But it found no evidence of communication between Mr Gupte and the noticees, and relied on the Supreme Court's 2022 Balram Garg decision, which says family ties and a trading pattern alone do not prove that information was passed on.

The officer therefore held the charges could not be sustained and disposed of the show cause notice dated 22 March 2017 without penalty. A separate order of the same date by a whole-time member, in the matter of the same trading, reached a similar result on the direction proceedings.

The record does not show whether SEBI appealed this outcome. It does not describe any criminal case, and no money was ordered.

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. 2023-08-25 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.