SEBI v. Camac Commercial Company Ltd, Samir Jain and others (hidden promoters, 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 March 2023 a SEBI whole time member found that Camac Commercial and its controllers had hidden two individuals as non-promoters for six years to avoid minimum public shareholding rules, leaving the stock effectively untradeable. Penalties totalled about Rs 14.82 crore and the promoters were restrained until the company complies.

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

148m 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

This final order of 28 March 2023 was made by SEBI whole time member S. K. Mohanty. It concerns Camac Commercial Company Ltd, listed on the Calcutta Stock Exchange, and seven others: Samir Jain and Meera Jain, who held directorships at the Times Group company Bennett Coleman, and five corporate shareholders listed as the company's promoters. It is one of a pair of orders issued the same day, with a companion on PNB Finance and Industries.

The case followed complaints, a Securities Appellate Tribunal direction and Supreme Court extensions of time that required SEBI to investigate eight little-known companies that held large stakes in the Times Group parent. SEBI examined 2013 to 2019 and found that the corporate promoters held about 68.85 percent of Camac, while Mr and Ms Jain held about 25.6 percent between them and were never declared promoters, but were instead shown as public shareholders. With the Jains counted, the promoter group held about 94.45 percent, well past the 75 percent ceiling that the public holding rules set for promoters.

The whole time member held the charges substantially established. He found the company filed false shareholding pattern disclosures year after year, on six annual occasions and in 24 quarterly filings, that the Jains made none of the required promoter disclosures, that minimum public shareholding rules were breached for six financial years so that there was effectively no trading or price discovery, and that the concealment was fraud under section 12A of the SEBI Act and PFUTP Regulations 3 and 4(1).

The directions required proper disclosures naming all seven as promoters, asked the exchange to act under SEBI's circular, restrained the promoters from the securities market until the company complies, and barred the two individuals from director and key managerial roles until then. The penalties were for the company Rs 1 crore, Rs 5 crore and Rs 5 crore under different sections including Rs 5 crore under section 15HA, for each Jain Rs 21 lakh, Rs 20 lakh and Rs 1 crore, and Rs 20 lakh on each of the five corporate shareholders. This adds up to about Rs 14.82 crore.

The record does not show whether the order was appealed or whether public shareholding has since been restored.

This library tags the matter as misleading issuer disclosure, because the finding is that the issuer repeatedly filed a false shareholding picture. 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. 2023-03-28 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.