Manpasand Beverages | ‘Fake’ company, GST fraud & more; Here's how SEBI unfolded this corporate scam

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Manpasand Beverages Scam: The capital markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has barred Manpasand Beverages Ltd (MBL) and its top officials and directors from the securities markets for a period of three years from now and also imposed a total penalty of ₹74 lakh for manipulating and mis-reporting the company's financial statements. Apart from MBL, those who restrained by SEBI are -- the promoter, chairman, managing director (CMD) Dhirendra Singh, promoter and executive director Abhishek Singh and chief financial officer (CFO) Paresh Thakkar. Also, these four entities have been fined ₹17 lakh each, which needs to be paid within a period of 45 days, SEBI said in its recently released 55-page order.

According to PMS fund manager Amit Mantri, essentially everything in the company was fake. ‘’The company existed only on the stock market and not in the real world. Unfortunately, this is also true of a large number of smidcap stocks and majority SME stocks in this market,'' said Mantri on ‘X’.

Dhirendra Singh, Abhishek Singh and Paresh Thakkar have also been prohibited from holding position of director or key managerial personnel in any listed public company or any intermediary registered with the regulator in any capacity for five years. They have also been restrained from accessing the securities market for three years. The company's former independent directors -- Milind Babar and Chirag Doshi -- were fined ₹2 lakh each and current independent directors --Nishish Mobar and Bharti Naik were fined ₹1 lakh each.

Naik was non-executive director at the relevant time. --The complaints were received in September 2019 from Bipin Rathod, then chairman of MBL’s audit committee. --Further, SEBI investigated to