TaxTMI 
TaxTMI 
2018 (8) TMI 742
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....ties and Exchange Board of India ('SEBI' for short) dated November 30, 2015. By the said order penalty of Rs. 72 lakh each has been imposed on the appellants under Section 15HA of the Securities and Exchange Board of India Act, 1992 ('SEBI Act' for short) and Regulations 3(a) (b) (c), 4(1), 4(2)(e) of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Prohibition of Fraudulent and Unfair Trade Practices Relating to Securities Market) Regulations, 2003 ('PFUTP Regulations, 2003' for short). Since these appeals arise from the same impugned order, by consent of parties, both the appeals are heard together and are disposed of by this common decision. 2. It has been held in the impugned order that the appellants were promoters of a company by the name....
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....t in Appeal No. 416 of 2016) on November 28, 2006 and PCL replied on February 25, 2007 confirming that the appellant was never a promoter of PCL and also promising that the records will be corrected accordingly. Similarly, Parag Shah (Appellant in Appeal No. 477 of 2016) had taken up the matter with PCL on May 15, 2007 to which PCL replied on July 15, 2007 confirming that Parag Shah was also never a promoter of PCL and also stating that the mistakes in the records will be rectified. The Managing Director of PCL, Pratik Shah, has also given a notarized affidavit on March 28, 2014 to this effect stating that the promoter holding statement given by PCL to BSE contained inadvertent errors. 4. Learned Senior Counsel for the appellants also argu....
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....hey were never promoters of PCL; they were just ordinary shareholders of PCL who sold their shares in the normal course of business and therefore not committed any violations. In any event even if it is argued that while transferring their shares they had benefited from the corporate announcements of PCL the penalty imposed at the rate of 3 times the alleged profits made is too harsh and excessive when in similarly placed cases penalty of only Rs. 2 lakh was imposed by SEBI and where penalty of Rs. 10 lakh was imposed by SEBI this Appellate Tribunal had reduced it to Rs. 2 lakh. 7. Learned Senior Counsel Shri Pradeep Sancheti appearing on behalf of the respondent SEBI walked us through various documents and submitted that the appellants he....
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....put forth by the Learned Counsel for the appellants. The misleading corporate announcements are not in dispute and are found to be violative of the relevant regulations as upheld by this Tribunal in our orders dated February 1, 2018 and June 28, 2018 in the matter of Corporate Strategic Allianz Limited vs. SEBI (Appeal No. 4 of 2017) and Pratik Minerals Pvt. Ltd. vs SEBI (Appeal No. 303 of 2016). The argument of the appellants that they were never promoters of PCL has no merit because of the records to the contrary available and perused by us. In all the quarterly filings starting March 31, 2001 till September 30, 2007 names of Jayesh Shah, Tushar Shah and Parag Shah have been shown as promoters in the shareholding pattern filed by the comp....
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....erred by August 2006 does not make any difference since 2 of the 3 major misleading corporate announcements had been made by the Company prior to that date and the appellants got the benefit of the same while disposing off their entire shareholding. As demonstrated the common mobile number becomes another point of convergence between the promoters and the related entities. Since they were promoters their argument that they had no role in the misleading corporate announcements also has no merit. Another interesting fact emerging from these appeals (and in all appeals on the PCL matter) is the unwillingness of the appellants to disclose the details of their obtaining the shares of PCL; though the appellants attribute it to memory loss emanati....
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....B Sumedh Complex, Ahmedabad) sometime in 2006. Tushar Shah went to Odisha and Parag Shah went to Una, Gujarat (and Jayesh Shah went to Junagadh district of Gujarat). Both of them did write identical letters to the company (Pentium Infotech Ltd./ PCL) during November 2006 and May 2007 seeking to delete their name from classifying them as promoters and got similar replies thereon. They never tried to do so since March 2001 despite the fact that as major shareholders they would have been getting the annual report of the company on a regular basis. 11. Accordingly, we find no merit in the submissions that the appellants were not part of the promoter group; had no role in the corporate announcements, and had not benefitted in anyway. The orders....