NSE's former MD & CEO Chitra Ramakrishna arrested by CBI in Colo scam case
- EP News Service
- Mar 06, 2022
Former NSE's MD & CEO Chitra (center) and Subramanian (circled)
NEW DELHI: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has arrested the former managing director and CEO of National Stock Exchange (NSE) Chitra Ramakrishna in the co-location (NSE Colo) scam case.
The central agency had carried out search operations at her residence after expanding its probe into the NSE Colo scam following a SEBI order in which she had referred to a mysterious yogi from the Himalayas guiding her actions. She had claimed that she communicated with him only by email and had shared very sensitive data with him, disregarding all corporate governance norms.
Along with search operations, the CBI had been grilling Chitra Ramkrishna for the past three consecutive days however she was being evasive and not cooperating in the investigation.
To scientifically ascertain her lack of cooperation the CBI had also involved a senior psychologist from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) who after questioning her come to the conclusion that she was evasive in responses leaving no option for the agency but to arrest her for custodian interrogation.
After their initial probe following the SEBI order, the CBI had arrested former NSE group operating officer Anand Subramanian on February 25, and apparently, it turned out that he was the mystic yogi who was her right hand and assisted in running one of the largest financial marketplaces in the world during their tenure at the exchange.
The arrest comes after a special CBI court had rejected her plea for anticipatory bail yesterday, during which it had had also pulled up CBI, saying its conduct was, "Most lackadaisical to say the least, as no action seems to have been taken against main beneficiaries of the present co-location scam."
Special Judge Sanjeev Aggarwal had even taken the market regulator SEBI to task, noting that, "Despite being a capital market watchdog, has been too kind and gentle qua the accused persons in the present FIR."
He has also taken into account the fact that the accused had tried to subvert the investigation and had paid bribes to SEBI and NSE officials which in itself amounts to a serious crime.
Several agencies like the SEBI, CBI and the Income Tax department (IT Dpt), are investigating the scam that was exposed in 2015, however, all the agencies have been taking their own sweet time and so far no credible prosecution has been initiated.
After the scam was unearthed agencies identified over two dozen accused in the case which included apart from several entities, many senior officials from NSE and SEBI, but it took three sweet years for the CBI to register the case. In May 2018, it registered an FIR against Sanjay Gupta, promoter of Delhi-based brokerage firm OPG Security, his brother-in-law Aman Kokrady and Ajay Narottam Shah.
OPG was the broker that was at the core of the Colo scam and received the maximum benefit, as being the part of the scam was provided with all multiple logins and access to NSE's secondary servers with collusion with NSE officials.
Shah along with his wife, Susan Thomas played a key role in the exploitation of NSE's TBT architecture by colluding with the exchanges' top brass to get trade data from NSE during 2005-06 under the garb of doing research. He then passed the data to a company that prepared ALGO'S that were used in the Colo facilities. Thomas is the sister of Sunitha Thomas, who is married to NSE’s trading head Suprabhat Lala during that time.
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