Manpasand Beverages, promoters, directors fined Rs 74 lakh; co, senior mgmt banned from market for 3 years

The company; its Executive Director, Chairman and MD Dhirendra Hansraj Singh; Executive Director Abhishek Dhirendra Singh and former chief financial officer Paresh Thakkar have been fined Rs 17 lakh each and have been restrained from accessing the securities market for three years.

Dhirendra, Abhishek and Thakkar have also been restrained from holding any position of director or key managerial personnel in any listed public company or any public company that intends to raise money from the public or any intermediary registered with SEBI in any any capacity for five years from the date of the order.

The company's independent directors Milind Babar and Chirag Doshi were fined Rs 2 lakh each, independent director Nishish Mobar was fined Rs 1 lakh and its non-executive director Bharti Naik was fined Rs 1 lakh.

The present investigations started after the market regulator received emails from the Chairman of the company's Audit Committee, Bipin Rathod, in 2019. The emails alleged fraudulent transactions and financial mismanagement at the company.

In the order, Sebi's whole-time member Ashwani Bhatia noted that manipulations in Manpasand had started prior to the investigation period, as the company was found to have mis-utilised proceeds of a Qualified Institutional Placement done by the company in September 2016. This misutilisation was established via an Adjudication Order dated March 02, 2023, passed by SEBI.

In that order, SEBI had also found inter alia that Manpasand had deficiencies in internal controls and had published misleading financial statements for FYs 2016- 17 and 2017-18.

That said, in the passing of the current order, these were not been taken into consideration since they were not part of the present proceedings.