SEBI v. Murari Lal Sarda and others (front running of Thar Share Brokers group trades, 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.

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In November 2024 SEBI found that five related traders had front run the orders of three connected Jaipur companies on the strength of information passed on by a sixth person who placed those orders. The order directed disgorgement of Rs 1,43,20,173, restrained the six for 1 or 2 years and imposed penalties of Rs 45,00,000 in total.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

4.5m 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 28 November 2024 was issued by SEBI quasi-judicial authority G. Ramar. The six noticees were Murari Lal Sarda and his wife Sushila Sarda, Vikas Sarda, the Vikas Sarda HUF and Preeti V Sarda, and Ashish Sarda. SEBI examined trading from January 2022 to June 2023 after a surveillance alert.

The 'big clients' were Parshvanath Finvest Pvt Ltd, Thar Share Brokers Pvt Ltd and Gangwal Commodities Pvt Ltd, three Jaipur entities sharing an address and directors who were husband and wife. SEBI alleged that noticees 1 to 5 traded ahead of the big clients' orders and that Ashish Sarda, who placed those orders through the broker, acted as the information carrier and received funds from the front runners. It found the big clients' orders accounted for a considerable share of volume in the scrips involved.

The order finds the front running established over about one and a half years. The front runners' profits, on the order's table, were Rs 86,78,961 in the cash segment and Rs 56,41,212 in the derivatives segment of NSE, totalling Rs 1,43,20,173. It found that Ashish Sarda facilitated the trades as the information carrier.

SEBI directed noticees 1, 2, 4 and 5 to disgorge Rs 1,43,20,173 with liability allocated between related pairs, restrained Murari Lal Sarda and Sushila Sarda for 1 year and the other four for 2 years, and imposed section 15HA penalties of Rs 5,00,000 on each of the first five noticees and Rs 20,00,000 on Ashish Sarda, Rs 45,00,000 in all. It also froze asset sales except for paying the disgorgement and penalties.

The record does not show whether anyone appealed, whether the money was paid, or what the broker's own role was; a separate order dealt with the broker's compliance failures. No criminal case is mentioned.

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. 2024-11-28 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
• 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.