SACRAMENTO, CA (TIP): An Indian American former CEO of Systems America Inc., has been charged for violating federal security rules by allegedly misrepresenting facts about his company and engaging in manipulative penny stock trades to boost its share price.

The 49-year-old Adesh Kumar Tyagi issued exaggerated press releases and made misleading disclosures about his company, Law360 reported quoting a complaint filed on Wednesday by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in California federal court.

“His game plan was to grow the company through acquisitions. Lacking cash, however, he engaged in a fraudulent scheme to artificially inflate the per-share price of the company’s securities so that he could use Systems America stock to acquire other companies,” the legal news service reported.

Systems America, which was later renamed Cloudeeva was founded by Tyagi as a privately held company in 1994. In the mid-2000s the company started falling into neglect, but, in 2010, Tyagi wanted to revive the company.

The company claimed that it has eight full-time employees and Fortune 500 clients when it actually had no full-time employees and only two clients. Tyagi also said that no officer or director of the company had been named as a defendant in a criminal proceeding when he himself had two pending criminal proceedings as a defendant.

The SEC alleges that Tyagi tried to push up his company’s share price by ‘marking the close’ – buying the stock just before the close of the trading day at a slightly higher price than was on offer on at least 16 different dates.

According to Law360, he pleads guilty to criminal securities fraud charges brought over trading schemes in November 2016 and is scheduled for sentencing in January 2018.

SEC seeks disgorgement of the more than $274,000 from Tyagi, which he allegedly earned through the sales of inflated stock and unspecified civil monetary penalties. It also seeks prejudgment interest, officer-and-director bar, penny stock offering bar and permanent injunctions that refrain Tyagi from participating in transactions of any security of an entity that he is related to.