Jane Avenue barred from Indian markets in probe by SEBI

The Securities Change Board of India (SEBI) has briefly barred Jane Avenue Group from accessing India’s securities market, after it accused the U.S. agency of widespread market manipulation.

Jane Avenue disputed the findings of SEBI’s interim order and mentioned it’s going to additional have interaction with the regulator, in response to queries from CNBC.

In line with an interim order posted on the regulator’s web site on Thursday, Jane Avenue’s “entities are restrained from accessing the securities market and are additional prohibited from shopping for, promoting or in any other case dealing in securities, immediately or not directly.”

SEBI additionally issued an interim order to freeze over 48.4 billion Indian rupees ($566.3 million) from Jane Avenue in alleged unlawful features. It additional said that banks have been directed to make sure that “no debits are made, with out permission of SEBI,” for accounts held by Jane Avenue’s entities both collectively or individually.

The agency allegedly used numerous methods to artificially affect India’s benchmark Nifty 50 index — which tracks the nation’s prime 50 firms — and revenue from considerably bigger positions in index choices.

In line with SEBI’s 105-page interim order, Jane Avenue would aggressively purchase massive quantities of shares and futures which are a part of the BANKNIFTY index, which tracks the efficiency of India’s banking sector, early within the buying and selling day. The agency would then place massive bets that the index would decline later within the day.

Jane Avenue would then unload the positions it had purchased earlier, dragging the index decrease and making their earlier bets within the choices market much more worthwhile.

Whereas Jane Avenue would incur some losses, SEBI contended that it was a part of a “deliberate technique to control indices to the benefit of the buying and selling and positions,” and the losses had been offset by the agency’s a lot bigger and worthwhile choices commerce.

Whereas these actions weren’t a breach of any regulation, SEBI mentioned that the “depth and sheer scale” of their intervention, and the speedy reversal of their trades “with out any believable financial rationale, apart from the concurrent exercise in and impression on their positions within the BANKNIFTY index choices markets,” was manipulative.

SEBI mentioned that repeated cases of manipulative buying and selling continued even after an “specific advisory” was issued to the agency in February 2025 by the Nationwide Inventory Change of India.

“Such egregious behaviour, in clear disregard/ defiance of the specific advisory issued to them by NSE in February 2025, amply demonstrates that in contrast to the overwhelming majority of International Portfolio Buyers and different market members, [Jane Street] Group shouldn’t be a very good religion actor that may be, or deserves to be, trusted,” the regulator mentioned.

“The integrity of the market, and the religion of tens of millions of small buyers and merchants, can now not be held hostage to the machinations of such an untrustworthy actor,” SEBI added.

A Jane Avenue spokesperson mentioned that the agency “is dedicated to working in compliance with all laws within the areas we function around the globe.”

SEBI’s transfer comes as a number of different international buying and selling companies, from Citadel Securities and IMC Buying and selling to Millennium and Optiver, have been stepping up their presence in India, to journey on its booming derivatives markets.

The Indian regulator had beforehand expressed issues over practices akin to algorithmic buying and selling, which SEBI mentioned in a September 2024 report allowed proprietary merchants and overseas portfolio buyers to make 610 billion Indian rupees in income in FY 2024, whereas retail buyers and different market members misplaced the identical quantity throughout that interval.

— CNBC’s Aparajita Saxena contributed to this report