SEBI v. Aadhaar Ventures India Ltd and others (2013 preferential allotment, 2023)

Judgment entered

✓ Checked against the primary document on October 9, 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 February 2023 a SEBI adjudicating officer penalised Aadhaar Ventures India and three directors a total of Rs 6 lakh for a March 2013 preferential allotment of about 134 crore shares to 31 allottees from which no money was found to have reached the company. The order calls it a fraudulent fund-raising scheme that gave a false impression of capital infusion.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

—

Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

600k 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 adjudication order of 27 February 2023 was made by SEBI adjudicating officer Vijayant Kumar Verma. The noticees are Aadhaar Ventures India Ltd (formerly Prraneta Industries Ltd), a company listed on BSE, its managing director Omprakash A. Khandelwal, executive director Jils Raichand Madan and director and bank signatory Jyoti Munver. None of them replied to the notice or attended, so the officer proceeded on the record. This is a companion to a separate October 2022 order on the same company that found a different fund-routing charge not established.

SEBI examined the preferential allotment of 134,52,48,000 equity shares of Re 1 to 31 non-promoter allottees, approved at a meeting of January 2013 and made on 11 March 2013, for the period 15 January to 11 March 2013. It alleged that no money from any of the allottees appeared in the company's bank accounts in that window, that the funds on the company's books had come in one to two years earlier, and that the allotment was an arrangement to create price and volume effects while giving the impression that new capital had been raised. A listing disclosure failure was also alleged. The charges were fraud under section 12A of the SEBI Act and PFUTP Regulations 3 and 4(1), and a breach of ICDR Regulation 77(1) on receipt of consideration.

The adjudicating officer treated the unanswered charges as unchallenged and also examined the record, including a board minute in which the chairman told directors that all application money had been received and showed the bank statement. He held the company and the three directors liable for devising a fraudulent scheme of fund raising that gave a false impression of capital infusion. The directors were held answerable for the company's conduct because they sat on the board and one signed the exchange papers.

The penalty was Rs 6,00,000 under section 15HA, imposed jointly and severally on the four noticees and payable within 45 days. The officer noted that gain and loss could not be quantified and counted the time since 2013 as mitigating. The listing-agreement charge under the Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act does not appear in the penalty table.

The record does not show who the allottees were beneficially, what price the shares were issued at, or whether the order was appealed.

This library tags the matter as misleading issuer disclosure, because the order finds the company gave a false picture of capital raised through its preferential allotment. 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.

• Misleading issuer disclosure — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2023-02-27 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
• 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.