SEBI v. Maheshwari Financial Services Ltd (Aplaya Creations, 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 30 November 2023 a SEBI whole-time member restrained Maheshwari Financial Services from the securities market for eight years for pushing up the price of Aplaya Creations shares in 2014-15 with tiny sell orders placed above the last traded price. The order followed a Securities Appellate Tribunal remand of an earlier 2019 order.

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 whole-time member issued this final order on 30 November 2023 against Maheshwari Financial Services Ltd, a brokerage company, in the matter of Aplaya Creations Ltd, which was listed on BSE. The order follows a Securities Appellate Tribunal decision of 13 May 2022 that set aside an earlier SEBI order of 27 March 2019 against the noticee.

SEBI's show cause notice of June 2017 covered the company, two of its officers, the noticee and a second trading entity. It alleged that Aplaya's price rose from Rs 18 to a high of Rs 490 between April 2014 and July 2015, with 2.17 crore shares trading in 23,088 trades, though the scrip had traded on only three days in the previous nine years and its fundamentals had not changed materially.

The order finds the noticee was a major counterparty to the six top buyers who lifted the price and that, together with the second entity, it placed 112 first trades for only 1 to 5 shares each, with the noticee executing 50 sell trades above the last traded price, adding Rs 88.85 to the price. Those 50 trades involved only 74 shares in total. The member held this created a false appearance of trading and artificial price rise, relying on a tribunal decision on one-share sales. The noticee made no submissions on the merits, and a change in its management was no defence.

SEBI restrained the noticee from the securities market for eight years from the date of the order, with its holdings frozen and open derivative positions to be closed out within three months, and set off the time already served under the 2019 order. No monetary penalty is stated in this order.

The record does not show whether the noticee appealed again, and the order mentions no 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. 2023-11-30 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.