SEBI v. Chandrima Mercantiles Limited and others (price and volume manipulation of Quasar India, 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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In October 2025 a SEBI adjudicating officer found that twenty linked entities drove up the price and volume of Quasar India shares through coordinated and circular trades. Penalties total Rs 2.64 crore, mostly Rs 2.5 crore jointly on eighteen noticees.

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

26.4m 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 adjudicating officer, Amit Kapoor, issued this 56-page order on 31 October 2025. There are twenty noticees: a company, Chandrima Mercantiles Limited, and nineteen individuals. The first eighteen are alleged to have traded as a connected group, and the last two, Mrugesh Natwarlal Ruparel and Arpit Piyushbhai Shah, are alleged to have helped one of them and to have ignored summons. The record names the first twelve defendants and eight more are covered.

SEBI investigated trading in Quasar India Limited from May 2022 to December 2023. It alleged that connected entities, several of them holders of around one percent of the company, built volume in a thinly traded stock and contributed to its price rise, and that most of them then sold out. It also alleged circular trades among nine of them on several days.

The order finds that the first eighteen noticees were connected and generated the volume and price rise, and that nine of them also entered circular trades without any intention of changing real ownership, giving a false appearance of trading. It finds violations of section 12A(a), (b) and (c) of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3, 4(1) and 4(2) of the PFUTP Regulations. It finds that the last two aided and abetted a lead noticee and violated section 11C(5) by failing to appear on summons.

The penalties are Rs 2,50,00,000 payable jointly and severally by the first eighteen noticees, and Rs 7,00,000 each on the last two, so Rs 2,64,00,000 in total. The officer recorded that the first eighteen collectively made about Rs 1.96 crore of profit, noted the delay in issuing the notice, and applied the Supreme Court decision in SEBI v. Bhavesh Pabari on penalty factors.

The record does not show whether any noticee appealed, whether the penalty was paid, or investor losses, which the order says cannot be determined. It does not show a criminal case or a market ban.

This library tags the matter as price manipulation and wash (circular) trading. 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.

• Price manipulation — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.
• Wash trading — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2025-10-31 SEBI adjudication 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.