Business / ₹3 lakh fine on Shilpa, Raj & his firm by SEBI for violating insider trading rules

Mumbai: The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has imposed a penalty of ₹3 lakh on Bollywood actor Shilpa Shetty, her husband and businessman Raj Kundra, and his company Viaan Industries for flouting its Insider Trading rules, news agency ANI reported.

Kundra, Shetty and Viaan Industries have been slapped with the fine for a three-year delay in the revelation of an allocation of preferential shares, Moneycontrol reported.

Viaan Industries had made a preferential allocation of 500,000 equity shares in 2015, of which, 128,800 were alloyed to Kundra and Shetty – the company’s promoters. As per SEBI’s Prohibition of Insider Trading Rules, 2015, the husband-wife duo had to reveal this transaction to the company within two days in case it surpassed ₹10 lakh value. The SEBI stated that the disclosures associated with the 2015 transaction were made only in 2019 despite the value exceeding ₹2.5 crore each, according to the Moneycontrol report.

This comes amid Mumbai Esplanade court refusing to grant bail to Kundra, who was remanded to police custody for 14 days till July 27 on Tuesday, in connection to alleged creation of pornographic films. He was apprehended on July 19 along with 10 others on charges related to the matter that is being probed by Mumbai Police Crime Branch.

The 45-year-old businessman has been charged with cheating and for indecent and obscene advertisements under the Indian Penal Code (IPC). He has also been charged with robbery in the FIR lodged against him.

Meanwhile, in their remand application, Mumbai Police has claimed that Kundra earned nearly ₹1.17 crore from subscribers of his HotShots app on Apple’s App store from August to December of last year. Although the app has been taken down by both Apple and Google Play Store, police are yet to procure details regarding Kundra’s earnings from HotShot’s subscribers on Play Store.