In a tweet, Arshad Warsi said he and his wife Maria Goretti have zero knowledge about stocks and invested in Sadhna Broadcast Limited after taking advice.
By India Today Business DeskActor Arshad Warsi issued a clarification on Friday after he was barred from trading securities by market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) in connection with a YouTube pump-and-dump scheme.
In a tweet, the 54-year-old actor said he and his wife Maria Goretti have no knowledge about stocks and invested in Sadhna Broadcast Limited after taking advice.
“Please do not believe everything you read in the news. Maria and my knowledge about stocks is zero, took advice and invested in Sharda [Sadhna], and like many others, lost all our hard earned money,” Arshad Warsi said.
A day ago, Sebi took action against Arshad Warsi, his wife Maria Goretti and 29 other individuals for their involvement in a YouTube pump-and-dump scheme. Sebi sent notices and banned all of them from dealing in securities and stocks.
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The market regulator said it received complaints about price manipulation and offloading of shares by certain entities in the stock of Sadhna Broadcast Limited. Sebi explained that the individuals it has named were involved in creating misleading YouTube videos with false content about Sadhna’s stock to lure investors.
“Once these unsuspecting investors entered the scrip, the said entities allegedly offloaded their holding at an inflated price,” Sebi said. Sebi looked for irregularities under the Sebi act from April 27, 2022 to September 30, 2022.
The market regulator found that there was a jump in the price and volume of Sadhna’s stock between April 2022 and mid-July 2022. “A significant portion of the volume during this period was the result of the trades executed by some of the Noticees to this case,” Sebi said.
Also Read | Committed to ensuring market integrity, measures in place to address volatilitySebi
“During the second half of July 2022, false and misleading videos (“YouTube Videos”) about the company were uploaded on two YouTube channels, namely, “The Advisor” and “Moneywise” (“YouTube Channels”/ “Channels”). These YouTube videos peddled false and misleading news to recommend that investors should buy the Sadhna stock for extraordinary profits,” Sebi added.
Following this, there was an increase in the price and trading volume of the Sadhna stock and these volumes rose as a large number of retail investors were likely influenced by the misleading videos.
Soon after that, parties involved, including certain promoter shareholders, key management personnel of Sadhna and non-promoter shareholders, who held more than 1 per cent stake in the company offloaded a significant part of their holdings at inflated prices and booked profits.
This, however, left several retail investors with heavy losses as the value of the Sadhna stock plummeted after the above parties sold shares at inflated prices.
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