Former NSE chief Chitra Ramkrishna sent to seven-day CBI custody in co-location scam
The case pertains to allegedly granting preferential access of the National Stock Exchange trading platform to certain private financial service firms.
Former National Stock Exchange Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Chitra Ramkrishna, was on Monday remanded to seven-day custody of the Central Bureau of Investigation, reported NDTV.
She had been arrested on Sunday night in the 2018 National Stock Exchange co-location scam. The case pertains to allegedly granting preferential access of the trading platform to certain private financial service firms. On Saturday, a special CBI court had rejected her anticipatory bail plea.
On Monday, the CBI asked the court to grant remand of Ramkrishna. The investigating agency Ramkrishna refused to recognise Anand Subramanian, former group operating officer at the National Stock Exchange. Subramanian had been arrested in relation to the case on February 25.
“We have recovered 2,500 email exchanges between the accused [Ramkrishna and Subramanian],” lawyers of the CBI told the court on Monday, according to NDTV.
The central agency also said that Ramkrishna had been arrested as she gave “evasive” replies during investigation. “We need to confront her with the evidence,” CBI told the court.
Subramanian and Ramkrishna recently made news after the Securities and Exchange Board of India, or SEBI, had said on February 13 that the former NSE chief took decisions at the stock exchange based on the guidance of an unknown Himalayan ascetic.
The CBI suspects that Ramkrishna and Subramanian made up the story about the Himalayan “yogi” to mislead the investigation into the co-location scam, according to NDTV.
The co-location scam
In May 2018, the CBI had booked owner of Delhi-based financial advisor firm OPG Securities Sanjay Gupta and his brother-in-law Aman Kakrady, and some officials of the National Stock Exchange in connection with the case.
“It was alleged that the owner and promoter of said private company [OPG Securities] abused the server architecture of NSE in conspiracy with unknown officials of NSE,” the CBI had said in the first information report filed in 2018, according to PTI.
The FIR also alleged that unknown officials of the National Stock Exchange had provided “unfair access” to OPG Securities using the co-location facility during the period 2010-2012 that enabled it to login first to the server of the exchange.
This allowed the financial services firm to get market data ahead of any other broker, according to the FIR. Ramkrishna was the chief executive officer and managing director of the exchange from April 2013 to December 2016.