SEBI v. Suresh Venkatachari and others (insider trading, SecureKloud Technologies, 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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In July 2026 a SEBI quasi-judicial authority held that two promoters of SecureKloud Technologies dealt in its shares while holding unpublished information about the company's inflated financial statements. Each is barred for two years after an existing bar ends and penalised Rs 10 lakh; the notice against a third promoter was disposed of without direction.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

—

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 31 July 2026 comes from a SEBI quasi-judicial authority in Mumbai. SecureKloud Technologies Ltd., formerly 8K Miles Software Services, is a Chennai company listed on the NSE and BSE. The noticees are Suresh Venkatachari and R S Ramani, promoters and directors, and M V Bhaskar, who the investigation report said was also a promoter.

The background is a SEBI interim order of August 2022 and final order of 16 December 2022 against the company and its promoters. Those orders found that SecureKloud had inflated revenue and its balance sheet through fictitious transactions with entities controlled by the promoters, and the auditor, Deloitte, had resigned citing fraud. The 2022 interim order flagged that promoter share sales during the period suggested possible insider trading and left that for separate examination.

The show-cause notice of 10 September 2025 alleged that the promoters dealt in the company's shares, including through transfers and pledge-related transactions, during a period from April 2017 to 2 November 2019 when the true financial position was unpublished price-sensitive information, in breach of section 12A of the SEBI Act and regulation 4 of the PIT Regulations. The noticees objected on delay, on the view that the facts were already known to SEBI, and on the argument that a penalty had been paid.

The order imposes a two-year restraint on Mr Venkatachari and Mr Ramani, to start once the restraint under the December 2022 final order has ended, and a penalty of Rs 10 lakh each under section 15G. The notice was disposed of against Mr Bhaskar without any direction. The order does not direct disgorgement.

The record does not show an appeal or payment, and the amounts gained or losses avoided are not stated here. It describes no criminal case. The listing's keyword pass suggested a disclosure technique, but the order itself is about trading by insiders.

This library tags the matter as insider trading. 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.

• Insider trading — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2026-07-31 SEBI order imposing restraint 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.