SEBI v. Akhter Aziz Siddiqi and others (Fedders Electric and Engineering, 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 22 December 2023 a SEBI chief general manager found that Fedders Electric and Engineering recorded sham sales, purchases and debtors that misrepresented its accounts between 2012 and 2020. Five of six noticees were debarred for two years and penalised Rs 4.15 crore in total.

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

41.5m 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 final order on 22 December 2023 against six noticees: Akhter Aziz Siddiqi, Sham Sunder Dhawan, Bindu Dogra, Ritushri Sharma, Anita Kakar Sharma and Bharat Raj Punj. They were officers or directors of Fedders Electric and Engineering Limited, listed on NSE and BSE, which entered insolvency proceedings in 2019 and passed to new management under a plan approved in 2021.

SEBI acted on a complaint from one of the company's independent directors and on references from other agencies, and reviewed a forensic audit and a transaction audit. The notice alleged that 85 to 90 percent of sales and 72 to 92 percent of purchases were concentrated among 22 parties, that two-way dealings rose to nearly half of sales and 43.5 percent of purchases by 2017-18, that sales, purchases and debtors were fictitious, and that goods trading with no movement of goods was used to inflate turnover and raise bank limits.

The order upholds the allegations against the five debarred noticees as breaches of the PFUTP Regulations, the listing regulations and the securities contracts law. It records that the company's market value fell from a peak of Rs 339.69 crore to a low of Rs 14.94 crore, a loss of Rs 172.60 crore to public shareholders' wealth, and that dues to banks stood at Rs 997.76 crore when insolvency began. The notice against Anita Kakar Sharma was disposed of without adverse directions.

The five were barred from the securities market and from director or key managerial roles in listed companies and intermediaries for two years. Penalties under sections 15HA and 15HB were Rs 1,25,00,000 on Mr Siddiqi, Rs 1,20,00,000 on Mr Dhawan, Rs 35,00,000 each on Ms Dogra and Ms Sharma and Rs 1,00,00,000 on Mr Punj, Rs 4,15,00,000 in all.

The record does not show whether any noticee appealed. The order mentions diversion and siphoning allegations as part of the investigation scope but this record does not rely on them, and no criminal case is described.

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. 2023-12-22 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.