Mumbai: In a hard-hitting decision, Sebi, on February 29, banned 12 entities, including promoter of V Marc India Ltd, from the securities market after holding them responsible for allegedly indulging in a fraudulent scheme to manipulate volumes and price of company’s shares.
The Regulator also impounded wrongful gains of Rs 6.38 crore made by some of the entities from the manipulative scheme, Sebi said in an interim order on Thursday.
The case primarily deals with fraudulent and manipulative trading in the scrip of V Marc India Ltd, listed on NSE’s SME segment. It is alleged to be prima facie orchestrated by the promoter and company management along with the connected parties.
The Sebi prima facie found in its order that V Marc’s promoter and MD Vikas Garg and Sandeep Kumar Srivastava, former Whole Time Director had engaged the services of Prijesh Kurani to ‘operate the market’.
The Sebi order further said that Kurani, in turn, used his own and his connected entities trading accounts. He also engaged accounts of persons connected to Garg to manipulate the scrip.
Furthermore, Garg and the company management channelled funds through their connected entities to Kurani for executing the fraudulent scheme.
The alleged fraudulent scheme was set in motion as soon as the scrip was listed on April 8, 2021.
The Sebi order said, “the impact of this alleged fraudulent scheme is evident in the manner volumes surged and prices increased after which most of the entities — PV Manipulators — as well as the IPO subscribers — exited fully. The shares offloaded were purchased by public shareholders leading to the increase in their numbers as well,” Sebi said.
Sebi thus restrained 12 entities “from buying, selling or dealing in the securities market or associating themselves with the securities market, either directly or indirectly, in any manner whatsoever until further orders.
Besides Garg, Srivastava and Kurani, the other entities barred by the Regulator are Sudhir Gupta, Dharini Kurani, Rekha Kurani, Surbhi Agarwal, Vinod Vilas Sable, Seema Garg, Madhu Srivastava, Jai Kishore Singhal and Seema Agaral.
Sebi’s probe covered the period from April 9-30, 2021. It was based on the data obtained from the mobile device of Kurani, seized following the search and seizure operation carried out by the Regulator in May 2022 in the context of investigation into the matter of “Front running” of trades of Axis Mutual Fund.
