A special Delhi court on Monday extended the judicial custody of former MD & CEO of National Stock Exchange (NSE) Chitra Ramkrishna till April 11, in connection with the irregularities that took place at the exchange between 2010 to 2013.
The court will hear her bail application, after going through response of the Central Bureau of Investigation, which has to be filed by April 8. Earlier, the CBI had alleged that Ramkrishna continuously misguided the investigation officer by giving wrong statements. The accused in conspiracy with former NSE group operating officer Anand Subramanian influenced the NSE officials to facilitate him in having access to important decision-making processes and shared sensitive information with an unknown person, who is also referred to as “Siddha Purush” by Ramkrishna.
It is alleged that some brokers in connivance with insiders abused the algorithm and the co-location facility to make windfall profits. In the co-location facility offered by the NSE, brokers could place their servers within the stock exchange premises giving them faster access to the markets.
Investigations further revealed that during 2013-16 after Ramkrishna took over as MD & CEO of NSE, OPG Securities was allowed to connect to the secondary server of the COLO-TBT Dissemination server for over 300 trading days causing it undue gain, it said.
The CBI had also quizzed another former NSE CEO Ravi Narain in connection with the alleged abuse of the co-location facility by an NSE stockbroker. An audit report had allegedly referred to Subramanian as a mysterious yogi, but this was dismissed by the Sebi in its report on February 11. In its order, the regulator had said Ramakrishna and Subramanian committed ‘financial misdeeds’, and identified serious governance lapses and misrepresentation of facts at NSE between 2013 and 2017.
