The Securities and Exchange Board of India has barred Viresh Joshi, formerly chief dealer at Axis Mutual Fund, from the securities market for seven years, finding that he ran a front running scheme using confidential information about the fund house's impending trades. Twenty other people were barred for between three and seven years in the same final order.
Joshi was fined 3 crore rupees, with penalties across 21 people totalling 7.4 crore. An earlier interim order in February 2023 had directed the impounding of 30.55 crore rupees as the apparent unlawful gains, held jointly and severally.
Front running is straightforward to describe and hard to detect. Someone inside the chain who knows a large order is coming trades ahead of it personally, then profits from the price move the order itself causes. The client's money makes the price; the insider takes the difference.
The mechanics here explain why these cases take years. The regulator found that Joshi passed details of a large client's impending orders to an outside accomplice, Prijesh Kurani, who placed trades through conduit accounts held in the names of fifteen others. Three more people were found to have arranged those accounts and made the introduction. That structure exists precisely to break the link between the person with the information and the account that profits, and reconstructing it is what takes the time. The fraud was detected in 2022; the final order lands four years later.