SEBI v. C H P Finance Pvt Ltd and others (Safal Herbs, 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 20 September 2023 a SEBI adjudicating officer found that twelve connected noticees manipulated the price of Safal Herbs shares in 2013-15 by trading among themselves to lift the last traded price. They were penalised Rs 5,00,000 jointly and severally.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

—

Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

500k 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 issued this order on 20 September 2023. It names twelve noticees, three companies and nine individuals, led by C H P Finance Pvt Ltd, in the matter of Safal Herbs Limited, formerly Parikh Herbals Limited, which was listed on BSE. The period examined ran from February 2013 to September 2015.

SEBI began with a complaint and suspicious transaction reports from India's financial intelligence unit. Its investigation linked 27 entities through client-code details and off-market transfers, found 24 trading, and singled out the top contributors to upward price moves. It said 12 of them contributed Rs 330.14, about 70.65 percent of the market's total upward price movement, and that in 170 of their trades the counterparties were also group members, adding Rs 46.66 or about 10 percent of it.

The officer found that the noticees manipulated the price of the scrip, breaching section 12A of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3 and 4(1) of the PFUTP Regulations, although the charge under Regulation 4(2)(a) was not established. The material did not show any quantifiable gain or investor loss, nor earlier violations by these noticees.

Under section 15HA of the SEBI Act the officer imposed one penalty of Rs 5,00,000 on all twelve, payable jointly and severally within 45 days. Some noticees filed replies and some did not appear at the hearings.

The record does not show whether anyone appealed, whether any restraint or disgorgement was ordered elsewhere, or any criminal case.

This library tags the matter as price manipulation. 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.

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

Timeline

1. 2023-09-20 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.