Sebi slaps Rs 60 lakh fine on 6 entities for fraudulent trades

Market watchdog Sebi today imposed a total penalty of Rs 60 lakh on six entities for indulging in fraudulent trading in shares of Rodium Realty back in 2011.
Sebi has imposed "a penalty of Rs 10 lakh" each on -- Reena Pandey, Arun Kumar Bajpai, Uma Shankar Gupta, Kanchan Gupta, Abhay Kumar Mehta, HUF and Abhay Kumar Mehta -- for executing synchronised trades which were manipulative in nature and thereby resulted in creation of artificial volumes in the shares of Rodium.
In an order today, the market regulator said that the entities had "indulged into manipulative/fraudulent trading through synchronised/reversal method without an intention to change the ownership of shares and thereby created artificial volumes in the scrip of Rodium Realty Ltd during the investigation period (February 1-July 14, 2011)".

Sebi found that between February and July 2011, the entities were the major market participants in the scrip.
"It is noted that noticees indulged into reversal trades amongst themselves for 8,26,303 shares which accounted for 52.34 per cent of the total traded market volume and 83.05 per cent of their total traded volumes," the order said.
"Out of 8,26,303 shares, trades for 6,53,108 shares were synchronised in nature," it added.
In its order, Sebi noted that the entities had adopted a modus operandi of buying and selling almost same numbers of shares on same day in a synchronised/reversal manner and they had ultimately traded such huge number of shares for long time amongst themselves.