SEBI v. Janakiram Ajjarapu and others (expansion announcement and promoter sales, Decipher Labs, 2025)

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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A SEBI quasi-judicial authority found that Decipher Labs' promoter-directors announced grand expansion plans that were never followed up while they sold large blocks of shares into the resulting rally. It ordered three-year bans, disgorgement of about Rs 10.2 crore and penalties of Rs 95 lakh, and only warned the company secretary.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

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Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

9.5m 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

On 31 July 2025 a SEBI quasi-judicial authority issued an order in the matter of Decipher Labs Limited, which is listed on BSE. The noticees were the company, its director Janakiram Ajjarapu, its director Sushant Mohan Lal and its company secretary Kumar Raghavan. SEBI investigated from 12 November 2021 to 11 January 2022, a period in which the share price rose from about Rs 30 to a high of Rs 145.70 and the number of public shareholders rose from about 12,800 to about 39,300 by December.

SEBI's case was that on 1 December 2021 the company announced aggressive expansion plans, including new offices and acquisitions in pharmaceuticals and information technology and talks with a US firm on virtual and augmented reality, promising updates after due diligence. Mr Ajjarapu then discussed the plans in a YouTube interview, and further videos circulated. SEBI said the company produced no real documents beyond emails, prepared no feasibility reports, gave no updates and never progressed the acquisition after a draft letter of intent of 15 December 2021. On 29 and 30 December 2021 Mr Ajjarapu sold 10 lakh shares, and Mr Lal sold 2.99 lakh shares. SEBI found no volume or price rigging through trading.

The authority held that Mr Ajjarapu and Mr Lal had violated Regulations 3, 4(1) and 4(2) of the PFUTP Regulations and the PIT code on pre-clearance of trades, finding the announcement misleading and designed to support their sales. The authority treated the company as liable for the misleading announcements and failure to update. The company secretary was held to have acted under the directors' instructions during serious illness, and received only a warning.

The order restrained the two directors from the securities market for three years and the company from dealing in securities for one year. It directed disgorgement of Rs 7,90,90,000 by Mr Ajjarapu and Rs 2,30,82,800 by Mr Lal into the investor protection fund. Penalties were Rs 50 lakh and Rs 10 lakh on Mr Ajjarapu and Rs 30 lakh and Rs 5 lakh on Mr Lal, Rs 95 lakh in total.

The record does not show whether anyone appealed, whether the sums were paid, or what investors lost. The order is a regulatory sanction, not a criminal conviction.

This library tags the matter as misleading issuer disclosure and pump and dump. 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 2 techniques 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.
• Pump and dump — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2025-07-31 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
• 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.