SEBI v. Govind Raj Rao and others (Sharepro Services share-transfer and dividend fraud, 2023)
Judgment entered
Checked against the primary document on October 9, 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.
On 27 October 2023 a SEBI adjudicating officer penalised thirteen people linked to the registrar Sharepro Services a total of about Rs 33 crore for fraudulent share transfers and the diversion of shareholders' dividends, with its managing director and a senior colleague bearing the largest penalties.
The record
| Agency | SEBI (India) |
|---|---|
| Date filed | 2023-10-27 |
| Date resolved | 2023-10-27 |
| Court | SEBI adjudicating officer |
| Status | judgment |
| Asset class | equities |
| Instruments | shares and dividends of listed companies held by shareholders served by Sharepro Services |
| Criminal parallel | No |
| Defendants | Govind Raj Rao ; Indira Karkera ; Balram Mukherjee ; Anil Jathan ; Chetan Shah ; Pradeep Rathod ; Shrikant Bhalakia ; Sujitkumar Amarnath Gupta ; Bhavani Jathan ; Anand S. Bhalakia ; Dayanand Jathan ; Mohit Karkera |
| Techniques |
What was ordered
- Civil penalty
- —
- Disgorgement
- —
- Prejudgment interest
- —
- Total relief
- —
- Alleged gain
- —
- Penalty as published
- 330m INR
What is alleged to have happened
SEBI adjudicating officer Asha Shetty issued this 200-page order on 27 October 2023. The matter concerns Sharepro Services (India) Pvt. Ltd., a registrar and share transfer agent for listed companies, its managing director Govind Raj Rao, its vice president Indira Karkera and a ring of relatives and outside beneficiaries. Seventeen individuals were named on the cover of the order.
The case started with an anonymous complaint in October 2015. SEBI issued an interim order in March 2016 against Sharepro and fifteen others, confirmed in November 2017 for all but one. SEBI alleged that records of share transfers at Sharepro's office had been falsified and that its system showed dividends being paid to the rightful shareholders while the bank records showed them going to others, some of whom held no shares at all. The order gives examples in which accounts and dividends of deceased or dormant shareholders were redirected and the money passed on or withdrawn in cash. It also records that some noticees had died, so proceedings against them were abated.
The officer examined the role of each noticee, in a long analysis of the account trails, and held that those penalised had breached section 12A of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3 and 4 of the PFUTP Regulations 2003, and in some cases the duty to cooperate with the investigation. Four of the seventeen named on the cover received no penalty in the operative table.
The penalties under section 15HA included Rs 15 crore on Ms Karkera, Rs 10 crore on Balram Mukherjee, Rs 5 crore on Mr Rao and Rs 1.06 crore on Pradeep Rathod, with smaller sums of Rs 5 lakh to Rs 40 lakh on others, plus separate section 15A(a) penalties for failure to cooperate. The individual figures add up to about Rs 33 crore. No market restriction was imposed in this order.
The record does not show how much money was taken from investors in total, whether any of it was recovered, whether the company itself was penalised, or whether any appeal or criminal case followed.
This library does not assign a technique tag to the matter, because no technique in the library fits the conduct. 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.
Timeline
- 2023-10-27 SEBI adjudication 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.