SEBI v. Vishvanath Goswami and others (front running a foreign fund's trades, Chaturvedi group, 2026)

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 March 2026 SEBI order held that four people linked to the Chaturvedi group traded ahead of 350 orders of a foreign portfolio investor, using information passed on by a sales trader at the investor's broker. It restrains each for two years and fines each Rs 5 lakh, with no disgorgement because the sums were already paid.

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

2m 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 27 March 2026 was made by a SEBI quasi-judicial authority in Mumbai. It concerns what SEBI called front running of 350 trades of a large client, Societe Generale, a registered foreign portfolio investor, whose broker was Antique Stock Broking Limited. Atul Chaturvedi was one of the sales traders designated by Antique and, according to the order, knew about the investor's impending orders. The four noticees are Vishvanath Goswami, Umang Chaturvedi, Shyam Chaturvedi and Vinod Kumar Chaturvedi, entities connected to him who traded in the accounts at issue.

SEBI alleged that Atul Chaturvedi passed non-public information about the investor's orders to these front runners, who traded ahead of the orders and squared off for profit, in breach of section 12A of the SEBI Act and regulations 3 and 4 of the PFUTP Regulations, including the front-running provision in regulation 4(2)(q). Umang and Vinod Kumar Chaturvedi were said to have lent their trading and bank accounts.

The noticees argued, among other things, that they were not given the full order and trade logs of the client or of the market, that the case could not stand after SEBI had settled with the information carrier, and that the analysis in the notice could not be relied on. The order rejects those contentions and finds the violations of the PFUTP Regulations established against all four.

The directions restrain each of the four from accessing the securities market for two years, and impose a penalty of Rs 5 lakh each under section 15HA of the SEBI Act, Rs 20 lakh in all. The order records that other entities with smaller alleged gains had settled and accepted voluntary debarment of six months, and that the full amount to be disgorged had already been paid by Atul Chaturvedi, who was not alleged to have gained himself, so no disgorgement was ordered against these four.

The record does not show any appeal, the amount of the gains, or the loss to the investor. It describes no criminal case.

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. 2026-03-27 SEBI final order with restraints and penalties

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 (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.