SEBI v. NNM Securities Pvt Ltd and others (Bhatia Communications & Retail (India) Ltd, 2024)

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.

Report an error in this record (sebi-83722-price-manipulation-2024) by email

On 30 May 2024 a SEBI official found that a market maker, NNM Securities, and four connected investors drove up the shares of Bhatia Communications & Retail (India) Ltd and sold about 69 lakh shares into the rise. The order barred all five for three years, ordered disgorgement of Rs 7.50 crore and imposed Rs 50 lakh in penalties.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

—

Disgorgement

—

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

—

Penalty as published

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

The order of 30 May 2024 was made by an official of the Securities and Exchange Board of India against five noticees: NNM Securities Pvt Ltd, a registered market maker and stockbroker, and four of its designated investors, Miker Financial Consultants, Vibhuti Commodities, Festino Vincom and Nikunj Anilkumar Mittal. The investors had allocated funds to NNM to invest in small-company stocks and to help it meet its market-making duties. Bhatia Communications & Retail (India) Ltd had moved from the small-company platform to the main board in September 2020.

SEBI investigated trading between July 2021 and July 2022 after a complaint of July 2022 alleging that YouTube channels were uploading videos to manipulate and offload the shares. It alleged that the first four noticees acted together to lift the price from roughly Rs 65 at the start, in mid-2021, to Rs 293 by the following February, and later to a split-adjusted high of Rs 524. After the February 2022 split they were said to have dumped 69.24 lakh shares on unsuspecting investors, for a profit of Rs 7,49,56,333.

The order found the violations established, concluding that the noticees acted as a group and conspired to carry out the scheme, in breach of section 12A of the SEBI Act and the 2003 fraud and unfair trade practice regulations. It called the conduct serious and harmful to market integrity.

The directions required disgorgement of Rs 7,49,56,333 jointly and severally, with 12 percent simple interest from 14 July 2022, a three-year ban on dealing in securities for all five with their holdings frozen, and an instruction to NNM to inform its clients. Each noticee was penalised Rs 10 lakh under section 15HA, Rs 50 lakh in total.

The record does not show whether the YouTube channels were investigated, whether anyone appealed, or how much was recovered. It describes no criminal case.

This library tags the matter as price manipulation and pump and dump. 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 2 techniques 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.
• Pump and dump — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2024-05-30 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
• SEBI order
• Order (PDF)

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.