SEBI investigates, prosecutes, and adjudicates within the same institution, under a statutory design Parliament is now reconsidering: the Securities Markets Code, 2025, tabled in the Lok Sabha in December 2025, proposes to fold the SEBI Act into a single consolidated statute and attach fixed timelines to enforcement. That concentration of function buys speed, but it also puts pressure on the fairness of the process, since the same regulator that frames an allegation often decides, in the first instance, whether it holds. This paper asks how Indian courts and the Securities Appellate Tribunal have policed that pressure point, using four recent flashpoints: the Supreme Court’s ruling in T. Takano v. SEBI on disclosure of investigation material, the Tribunal’s late-2025 order in the Salgaocar-Ketan Parekh matter restoring a right to cross-examine, the Supreme Court’s application of res judicata to SEBI’s own repeat proceedings in SEBI v. Ram Kishori Gupta, and the unresolved question of how long an ex-parte interim order under Section 11(4) can survive before it becomes punishment without a hearing. Read together, these episodes show a regulator whose statutory toolkit, built for speed and market protection, keeps colliding with the demands of audi alteram partem and reasoned decision-making. The paper traces this doctrinal path from general administrative-law authority on cross-examination through to current SEBI practice, sets it against the constitutional due-process standard in Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, and asks whether the Securities Markets Code, 2025 addresses the structural sources of that friction. It argues that SEBI’s own procedural regulations, not case-by-case litigation alone, need to catch up, and closes with concrete proposals: a statutory outer limit on ex-parte orders, a calibrated disclosure rule distinguishing relied-upon material from the wider investigation file, and a clearer separation between the officers who investigate and those who decide.