SEBI v. Gulabchand Agrawal and others (Sanwaria Consumer, 2023)

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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On 30 November 2023 a SEBI chief general manager found that Sanwaria Consumer misrepresented its financial statements for 2017-19 and penalised its chairman, two whole-time directors and its CFO Rs 2.6 crore in total. Debarments ranged from one to three years.

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

26m 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

SEBI's chief general manager issued this order on 30 November 2023 against four noticees in the matter of Sanwaria Consumer Limited, listed on BSE and NSE since 1993: chairman Gulabchand Agrawal, whole-time directors Ashok Kumar Agrawal and Satish Kumar Agrawal, and chief financial officer Anil Kumar Vishwakarma. The company itself was in insolvency resolution proceedings, so no action was taken against it.

SEBI started from complaints and fraud monitoring reports passed on by the Central Economic Intelligence Bureau, which alleged fictitious sales and non-existent debtors, and from a bank-commissioned forensic audit. For the period April 2017 to September 2019 it alleged, among other things, overstated debtors, inflated advances, wrongly valued stock and misstated consolidated results, and that Mr Gulabchand Agrawal and Mr Satish Agrawal sold shares to avert notional losses of Rs 42.04 crore and Rs 21.37 crore.

The order finds that the company misrepresented its financial statements repeatedly during the period, in breach of the PFUTP Regulations and the listing regulations, and that the four were at the helm or approved the accounts. The order notes that the notice did not quantify any gain beyond the notional loss averted by the two share sellers, and treats those two as deserving higher penalties and longer debarment.

SEBI restrained the four from the securities market for three, one, two and one years respectively, and barred the chairman from director or key managerial roles in listed companies and intermediaries for two years. Penalties under sections 15HA and 15HB were Rs 1,05,00,000 each on the chairman and Mr Satish Agrawal and Rs 25,00,000 each on Mr Ashok Agrawal and the CFO, Rs 2,60,00,000 in total.

The record does not show whether any noticee appealed, whether the sums averted were recovered, or any criminal case.

This library tags the matter as misleading issuer disclosure. 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. 2023-11-30 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

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.