Jane Street Tells Indian Tribunal Its Own Regulator's Staff Found No Bank Nifty Manipulation

Jane Street Group LLC went back before India's Securities Appellate Tribunal on October 5, 2026, arguing that the country's markets regulator ignored its own staff's findings before freezing more than half a billion dollars of the trading firm's money.

Senior advocate Darius Khambata, representing Jane Street, told the tribunal that an internal note from the Securities and Exchange Board of India's own surveillance department could not establish that the firm had moved Bank Nifty prices in a direction that favored its derivatives bets. That note, Khambata said, recommended the matter not be pursued further, according to Moneycontrol.

The case traces back to SEBI's July 3, 2025 ex-parte interim order, which barred Jane Street from India's securities market and directed the firm to disgorge ₹4,843 crore, roughly $503 million, in what the regulator called unlawful gains. SEBI alleges Jane Street manipulated the NSE Nifty Bank Index through coordinated trading in constituent stocks and derivatives tied to it, according to Deccan Chronicle.

Jane Street deposited the money but has not resumed trading in India since the order, Deccan Chronicle reported. The firm denies the allegations outright. Khambata told the tribunal that Bank Nifty constituent stocks actually rose on days when Jane Street was selling shares, the opposite of what a manipulation case would require.

The Numbers Jane Street Is Leaning On

According to Khambata's submission, the internal SEBI analysis covered 135 trading days on which Jane Street traded Bank Nifty options. The top 10 profit-making days accounted for just 29.08 percent of the firm's total profit over that period.

Of 53 trading patches examined across those days, 48, more than 90 percent, showed no link between Jane Street's trades in individual Bank Nifty stocks and price moves that benefited its derivatives positions, Khambata said, as reported by Moneycontrol. The remaining five patches, spread across just four trading days, accounted for about 5 percent of the profit generated on the top 10 profit-making days.

Why the Probe Came Back

Khambata's central question to the tribunal was why SEBI revived the case after its own people had cleared it. He pointed to a timeline: the National Stock Exchange's report was dated November 13, 2024, and SEBI's surveillance report followed on December 11, 2024. SEBI then formed an interdepartmental committee on December 31, 2024, which ultimately led to the July 2025 order.

"What new, shocking material came to their knowledge?" Khambata asked, according to Moneycontrol. "If you have these two reports covering a wide spectrum, what caused you to form yet another team?"

A regulator shelving an internal staff finding and then standing up a separate interdepartmental team, without a public explanation for the reversal, raises process questions that invite this challenge. No source in this case shows SEBI has publicly detailed what new evidence, if any, drove the escalation.

A surveillance department's internal note is not necessarily the regulator's final word. Interdepartmental committees exist precisely to take a second look using broader evidence, including whistleblower complaints, that a first-line surveillance team may not have had. Nothing in the record reviewed here shows SEBI acted outside its legal authority in forming that committee, only that Jane Street wants to know what drove the decision.

LiveMint reported that Jane Street has formally petitioned the tribunal to compel SEBI to disclose the underlying trading and counterparty data behind the ₹4,843 crore order, along with inter-departmental communications and the whistleblower complaints that prompted the committee's formation. Khambata argued that withholding those documents would "vitiate" the process and violate natural justice.

What Happens Next

The Securities Appellate Tribunal's next hearing in the case is scheduled for today, October 6, 2026, according to Deccan Chronicle. Whether the tribunal orders SEBI to turn over the requested order logs, counterparty records, and whistleblower material remains an open question heading into that session.

SEBI has not issued a public response to Khambata's specific timeline argument in the sources reviewed here. The regulator's position, laid out in its July 2025 order, is that Jane Street's trading across Bank Nifty constituents and derivatives amounted to coordinated price manipulation benefiting the firm's positions. Jane Street has now deposited the disputed $503 million but remains barred from the Indian market while the tribunal weighs both the underlying manipulation claim and the document-disclosure fight that could shape how it rules.