SEBI v. Harish Kumar Sakaria (Gala Global Products price manipulation, remand dismissal, 2025)

Dismissed

✓ 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. 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 2025 a SEBI adjudicating officer, acting after the Securities Appellate Tribunal set aside an earlier Rs 8 lakh penalty, found that the allegations of synchronised and reversal trading against one investor were not established. The proceedings were closed without any penalty.

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

The adjudicating officer, Jai Sebastian, issued this order on 11 November 2025 in respect of one individual, Harish Kumar Sakaria. It follows a 2022 SEBI order that had imposed a penalty of Rs 8,00,000 on him, which the Securities Appellate Tribunal set aside on 7 August 2025 and sent back to SEBI for fresh consideration.

SEBI had alleged in a 2019 show cause notice that the share price of Gala Global Products Limited rose from Rs 161 to Rs 397 between December 2017 and March 2018. It named 26 suspected entities that it said used synchronised and reversal trades, and linked the noticee to them as one of the trading group. The alleged breaches were of section 12A of the SEBI Act and the fraud provisions of the PFUTP Regulations.

On rehearing, the officer relied on the Tribunal's observations in a related appeal. The order finds that nothing on record connected the noticee to the other suspected entities or to his counterparties, that his share of market volume was about 1.22 percent, his reversal quantity about 0.4 percent and his contribution to rising last-traded prices about 1.21 percent, and that the stock was liquid enough that such trades could not be taken to show a meeting of minds. It cites earlier Tribunal decisions that synchronised trading is not unlawful without proof of collusion.

The officer therefore held that the alleged violations were not established and disposed of the proceedings without imposing a penalty, so the earlier Rs 8 lakh penalty no longer stands in this record.

This record does not show whether SEBI appealed this dismissal. It makes no finding about the other suspected entities in the original investigation, and it does not describe any criminal case.

This library tags the matter as matched orders and price manipulation (alleged, not established). 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.

• Matched orders — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.
• Price manipulation — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2025-11-11 SEBI adjudication order on remand

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.