A company that had been erroneously filing a promoter's shareholding for more than ten years has been fined Rs 8 lakh. Its filing showed the promoter entity holding nearly 3x (2.77x) its actual holding.
The promoter entity Nath Royal has been fined Rs 5 lakh, and the compliance officers during this period Kruthika Apte and Rajshree Jain have been fined Rs 4 lakh and Rs 1 lakh respectively.
Techindia Nirman was found to be wrongly reporting promoter entity Nath Royal's holding as 24.99 percent between the quarter ended September 30, 2011, and December 31, 2021, when in reality it had been 9.1 percent since the quarter ended September 30, 2011. That was 15.89 percentage points off the mark.
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Meanwhile, the scrip has been a multibagger over the past few years, appreciating by more than 680 percent returns over five years.
In an order dated June 28, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) stated, "in a disclosure based regime the essence is not only about making disclosures but also inter alia about timely, correct and complete disclosures, which, if compromised with, may pose threat to orderly functioning and integrity of the securities market besides having a bearing on trust and confidence of investors in the securities market."
It added, "in the instant case concerned Noticees had repeatedly failed to and /or made incorrect disclosures".
Techindia Nirman, which was formerly Nath Seeds Ltd, had undergone restructuring through a demerger and was relisted on the exchanges from September 8, 2011. Nath Royal held 9.1 percent of the company then.
Another governance lapse
The regulator also noted the discrepancies in the names of the compliance officers in the documentation. Karthik Krishnamurthy was given as the compliance officer in the Reconciliation of Share Capital Audit Report, while Krutika Apte was named in the Annual Report from the quarter ended September, 2011, till that ended September 2017, and the quarter ended March 31, 2018.
The Sebi order stated that the regulator " observed that the name of Mr. Karthik Krishnamurthy was mentioned in Reconciliation of Share Capital Audit Report instead of Ms. Krutika Apte and Company has filed incorrect details of the Compliance Officer in its Reconciliation of Share Capital Audit Report from the quarter ended September 30, 2011 till the quarter ended September 30, 2017."
The order noted that there was nothing on record to show that the violations committed by the noticees were repetitive in nature.
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