SEBI v. Adhunik Dealcom Private Limited and others (front running of Santosh Industries orders, 2025)

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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A SEBI adjudicating officer found that a decision-maker at Santosh Industries passed advance details of the company's orders to a trading company, which traded ahead of them in nine instances for about Rs 24.4 lakh. Penalties of Rs 35 lakh, Rs 10 lakh and Rs 10 lakh were imposed, Rs 55 lakh in total.

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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Penalty as published

5.5m 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

On 4 July 2025 a SEBI adjudicating officer issued an order against Adhunik Dealcom Private Limited, Pradeep Kumar Poddar and Kamal Kumar Dugar in a front-running matter. SEBI had investigated trading between 1 June and 30 November 2022 for front running of the trades of a big client, Santosh Industries Limited (SIL).

SEBI alleged that Mr Dugar, who took SIL's trading decisions and traded for it, knew of its impending orders and passed them to the dealer of Adhunik Dealcom at the request of Mr Poddar, who was linked to that company. It said Adhunik Dealcom, which had not traded at all from April to 24 August 2022, made its first trade on 25 August 2022 and then traded ahead of SIL in nine instances, all in a buy-buy-sell pattern, in seven of them matching SIL's trades by 95 to 100 per cent. SEBI computed the unlawful profit at Rs 24,39,570.65. The charges were section 12A(a), (b) and (c) of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3, 4(1) and 4(2)(q) of the PFUTP Regulations.

The officer found the charges established. He relied on statements by Mr Poddar, Mr Dugar and the company's dealer that Mr Dugar supplied the information in all nine instances, and rejected the argument that the matching was unintentional or that Mr Dugar was free to deal with SIL's information as he wished, because he owed duties to SIL and its shareholders. The two firms' trading style, mostly short-term holding, did not fit the intraday trades.

Under section 15HA the order imposed penalties of Rs 35,00,000 on Adhunik Dealcom, Rs 10,00,000 on Mr Poddar and Rs 10,00,000 on Mr Dugar, Rs 55 lakh in total. The officer noted that SEBI had taken no previous action against them. The order imposed no market ban and no disgorgement.

The record does not show whether the noticees appealed, whether the penalties were paid, or what SIL lost. The order is a civil penalty, not a criminal conviction.

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. 2025-07-04 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.