CNBC Awaaz anchor leaked his stock tips to a broker before air — both banned 5 years

Pradeep Pandya hosted CNBC Awaaz's popular Hindi market show 'Pandya Ka Funda' until August 2021, with broker Alpesh Furiya appearing as a guest and technical analyst. From November 2019 to January 2021, SEBI found a high correlation between the stocks Pandya recommended on air and the Buy-Today-Sell-Tomorrow and intraday trades of Furiya and a web of connected entities — his family, two HUFs, Mahan Investment and Toshee Trade. Synchronised trading accounted for ₹5.35 crore of Furiya's profit, 79.3% of his total.

The mechanism was simple: Pandya shared each recommendation with Furiya before broadcast, and Furiya bought ahead of the viewer orders that lifted the price. SEBI's 55-page final order cites call data records showing Pandya was uniquely placed with advance access to the recommendations. Furiya even passed the tips to a contact, Opu Funikant Nag, in exchange for a salary increase. NSE's surveillance report of December 2020 started the paper trail.

In June 2024 SEBI barred all eight entities from the securities market for five years, fined Pandya and Furiya ₹1 crore each and the other six ₹10 lakh apiece, and ordered ₹10.73 crore of unlawful gains disgorged. It was the second CNBC Awaaz host caught in this scheme — Hemant Ghai had been barred in 2022 for buying through his wife's and mother's accounts before his own recommendations. SAT upheld SEBI's findings in February 2026.

₹2.6 crore in penalties; ₹10.73 crore unlawful gains to disgorge (₹8.4 crore already impounded); five-year market ban for all eight entities

The show's editorial process treated pre-broadcast recommendations as ordinary content rather than as material, market-moving information that had to be quarantined.

The profit loop was invisible to viewers: the anchor's tips, the broker's trades and the price move each looked ordinary in isolation; only surveillance data connecting them exposed the pattern.

The channel had already produced one identical case — anchor Hemant Ghai in 2022 — and no wall was built between talent and market activity.

Enforcement lag (the scheme ran until January 2021; the final order came in June 2024) meant the economics favoured the fraudsters for years.

Advice broadcast to an audience is itself a market-moving asset, and whoever controls the timing controls the money. Pre-broadcast access must be policed as strictly as a dealing-room wall.

SEBI issued a ₹2.83-crore recovery notice in February 2025 after the fines went unpaid. In February 2026 the Securities Appellate Tribunal upheld SEBI's findings in the case, and in May 2026 the Supreme Court defroze the accounts of one of the traders involved while litigation continued. The order sits alongside the Hemant Ghai case as the precedent for policing television stock recommendations in India.