Reliance was fined by SEBI for delaying the disclosure of its 2020 Facebook deal.

Reliance Industries and two of its compliance managers were penalized by a market regulator for breaking fair disclosure rules during the $5.7 billion agreement with Facebook.
Reliance Industries and two of its compliance officers were penalized by India’s market regulator on Monday for breaking fair disclosure rules during Facebook’s $5.7 billion investment in its digital unit in 2020.
In order to enable WhatsApp to provide payments services to millions of small companies, Meta’s Facebook spent $5.7 billion in Reliance’s Jio Platforms in April 2020. The agreement enabled Mukesh Ambani’s billionaire-owned Reliance to reduce its significant debt.
Reliance did not disclose the arrangement, according to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), despite newspaper stories in March 2020 publishing price-sensitive information about the impending investment that caused its shares to soar.
Requests for comment made outside of regular business hours were not immediately answered by Reliance.
In its order issued late on Monday, SEBI stated: “The company abdicated its responsibilities to verify and come clean on the unverified information that was floating around when the bits of (unpublished price-sensitive information) that later became selectively public.”
Once Reliance was aware of the “selective availability” of the material, SEBI claimed it was “incumbent” on Reliance to offer “appropriate clarification on its own.”
Reliance and the two compliance officers were both fined 3 million Indian rupees by the agency.