SEBI v. Pranav Dipak Desai and others (Ambit Capital dealers, Aequitas complaint, 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 29 November 2023 a SEBI adjudicating officer penalised an Ambit Capital dealer and his mother Rs 5,00,000 jointly and severally for trading ahead of a large client's orders through family accounts in 2018. A second dealer was cleared and a third noticee had already settled.

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 decided this matter on 29 November 2023 after complaints in 2019 from a law firm acting for Aequitas Investment Consultancy Pvt Ltd, a portfolio manager. The complaints said that dealers at its broker, Ambit Capital Pvt Ltd, front ran or mirrored Aequitas's orders using their own and family accounts. The noticees were dealer Pranav Dipak Desai, his mother Kokila Dipak Desai and dealer Ajay Krishnamurthy Rao; a fourth noticee, Pawan Agarwal, had settled in July 2023.

SEBI examined 2018 and alleged that the dealers used confidential knowledge of a large client's pending orders to trade first in the same shares through their relatives' accounts, breaching section 12A of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3 and 4 of the PFUTP Regulations, including the rule against front running.

The order finds the charge established against Mr Desai, an employee of the intermediary, who traded ahead through accounts of his late father and his mother, with trades of Kokila executed by him. Their combined profit was about Rs 1,79,600. The officer dropped the charges against Mr Rao: although the notice cited 12 instances of mirroring, his client had traded the same shares on 34 other days when the large client had not traded, so interest in those shares did not stem from knowledge of the large client's trades.

The officer saw no price impact or investor loss and imposed the minimum penalty under section 15HA of the SEBI Act, Rs 5,00,000, payable jointly and severally by Mr Desai and Ms Desai.

The record does not show the size of the complainant's loss, whether anyone appealed, or any criminal case.

This library tags the matter as front running. 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.

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

Timeline

1. 2023-11-29 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.