SEBI v. Rajiv Amarish Agarwal and others (ABC Bearings 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 18 September 2023 a SEBI adjudicating officer fined five of nine noticees a total of Rs 65,00,000 over trading in ABC Bearings shares before its July 2017 merger announcement with Timken India. Two advisers and the company's CFO were found to have passed on the information, and a relative of one adviser and the CFO's son were found to have traded.

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

6.5m 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 18 September 2023. Nine people were noticees. ABC Bearings Ltd, listed on BSE, announced a merger with Timken India at 2:09 am on 5 July 2017, and its share price rose 19.99 percent that day, from Rs 238.10 to Rs 285.70. The period of unpublished price sensitive information was taken to run from 25 January to 5 July 2017.

SEBI alleged that insiders passed information about the merger to people who traded. The charges named two partners of a professional firm that advised on the deal, Himanshu K. Desai and Anirudh R. Parikh, ABC's CFO Sudhirkumar Choudhary, a merchant-banker employee, and the traders Menal Parikh, Jaisingh Choudhary, Rajiv Agarwal, Varsha Agarwal and Hitesh Shah. A further trader, Sahir Patel, settled in a separate order.

The order finds that Mr Desai, Mr Anirudh Parikh and Mr Sudhirkumar Choudhary communicated the information, and that Mr Anirudh Parikh's mother Menal Parikh and Mr Choudhary's son Jaisingh traded on it, applying a preponderance-of-probabilities test to trading patterns, family ties and access. Menal Parikh made a profit of about Rs 4.01 lakh and Jaisingh Choudhary about Rs 7.42 lakh. The charges against Rajiv and Varsha Agarwal, Hitesh Shah and Nipun Lodha were not made out on the evidence, because the links relied on were circumstantial.

Under section 15G of the SEBI Act the officer imposed penalties of Rs 15,00,000 on Menal Parikh, Rs 20,00,000 on Jaisingh Choudhary, and Rs 10,00,000 each on Mr Desai, Mr Anirudh Parikh and Mr Sudhirkumar Choudhary, a total of Rs 65,00,000.

The record does not show whether the penalised noticees appealed, what investors lost, or any criminal case. The order does not order disgorgement.

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. 2023-09-18 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.