PNB MetLife's equity dealer front-ran its orders for three years, making ₹21 crore

In December 2024, SEBI passed an interim order barring nine entities from the securities market and impounding unlawful gains of ₹21.16 crore (roughly US$2.5 million). At the centre was Sachin Bakul Dagli, the equity dealer of PNB MetLife India Insurance Company, who for more than three years passed the insurer's impending trade orders to outside accounts that traded ahead of them.

The scheme had a family branch and an execution branch. Dagli's brother Tejas, an equity sales trader at Investec, supplied confidential information about the broker's institutional clients' orders. The pair shared it with Sandeep Shambharkar, who executed the front-running through accounts of Dhanmata Realty, Worthy Distributors and individual Pragnesh Sanghvi, with the two companies' directors Arpan Shah, Kabita Saha and Jignesh Dabhi helping move the money.

SEBI's investigation, covering January 1, 2021 to July 19, 2024, found that most of PNB MetLife's trading decisions were delegated to Dagli for execution — one man sat on effectively every order the insurer sent to market. Across the period the ring logged 6,766 front-running trades for a profit of ₹21,15,78,005.

PNB MetLife said it had cooperated fully with the authorities and had taken disciplinary action against the individual, calling the conduct fraud by a named employee against the company. The case still exposed a gap: the insurer's own compliance function never caught a pattern SEBI eventually flagged from outside.

Illegal gains of ₹21.16 crore (about US$2.5 million) across 6,766 trades; nine entities barred from markets and gains impounded

Execution authority was concentrated in a single dealer with no rotation, so one person saw every impending order.

The insurer's surveillance was tuned for a buy-and-hold book, not for market abuse, so 6,766 timed trades raised no internal alarm.

The leak crossed firms: the dealer's brother at Investec added the broker's client orders, so each side assumed the other was watching.

The trading accounts sat with relatives and friendly company directors, hiding the beneficiary chain from routine broker-level checks.

Concentrating execution in one dealer without surveillance turns your desk into a free look-ahead. Any institution routing large orders needs market-abuse controls, not just fund houses.

The December 2024 interim order barred Dagli, his brother, Shambharkar, the two shell companies' directors and the linked entities from the market and impounded the ₹21.16 crore of gains. PNB MetLife publicly thanked SEBI for concluding its findings and said disciplinary action was taken, while insisting it upheld the highest governance standards. The front-running only surfaced because SEBI probed suspicious trades tied to the insurer's order flow, not because of any internal escalation — a point compliance teams across India's insurers were left to absorb.