CBI issues LoC against former NSE MD Chitra Ramkrishna & 2 others in 2018 criminal case

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officials are making enquiries with former MD of National Stock Exchange (NSE) Chitra Ramkrishna in connection with a 2018 case of alleged irregularities linked to NSE. The CBI has issued Lookout Circulars (LoCs) against Chitra, former CEO of NSE Ravi Narain and former COO Anand Subramanian, in connection with the case, agency sources informed on Friday.

On May 28, 2018, the CBI had registered a case of criminal conspiracy, attempt to give and receive bribes, misuse of official position and destroying evidences against owner and Promoter of New Delhi based private company, unknown officials of Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) & National Stock Exchange (NSE), Mumbai and other unknown persons.

"It was alleged that the owner and promoter of said private company abused the server architecture of NSE in conspiracy with unknown officials of NSE. It was also alleged that unknown officials of NSE, Mumbai had provided unfair access to the said company using the co-location facility during the period 2010-2014 that enabled it to login first to the exchange server of Stock Exchange that helped to get the data before any other broker in the market. After the introduction of the Load balancer during October 2012 while servers of all other brokers were connected to the primary servers of NSE, the owner once again allegedly managed the data centre staff of NSE to get connected to the backup servers. Backup servers were with zero load and therefore had provided far better and fast access to the market feed to the said private company in comparison to other brokers. Thus, the favour was allegedly shown by unknown officials of NSE to a private company by providing market feed first in comparison to other brokers," said a CBI official.

"It was further alleged that in order to ensure the favourable report from SEBI in the enquiry carried out by SEBI against the role of said private company in the misuse of TBT architecture of NSE, the owner influenced the unknown officials of SEBI for which alleged bribe money was given to some unknown officials of SEBI. It was also alleged that another private person, a resident of Delhi was instrumental in the exploitation of NSE TBT architecture who collected NSE trade data in the year 2005-06 (apparently) in the name of carrying out research and with the help of these data, he developed an algo software named 'chanakya' which was sold to selected brokers including said private company. It was further alleged that the owner with the help of his relative was illegally trading in Dubai, Ghana, Singapore, Hongkong and China through said private company," the official said.

"After some new facts have come to light during the investigation of the said case, questioning is going on with Chitra Ramakrishna. CBI has issued LoCs against Ramakrishna, Ravi Narain and Anand Subramanian," said the official.