The Enforcement Directorate on Thursday, July 14, arrested the former managing director and chief executive officer of the National Stock Exchange, Chitra Ramakrishna in a money laundering case. The case is related to an alleged illegal phone tapping and snooping of stock exchange employees, and the ED made the arrest after getting the nod from a Delhi court to probe the matter.
As per a report by news agency PTI, special Judge Sunaina Sharma allowed four-day custodial interrogation of Ramakrishna. The former NSE MD was produced in the court from jail on order passed by the judge earlier. According to the report, the judge had issued a production warrant against the accused on a plea moved by the ED. After the accused was produced, the ED took permission from the court to interrogate her.
Later, the ED arrested Ramakrishnan on the ground of non-cooperation and again produced her before the court and urged for her nine-day custodial interrogation. The court, however, granted her four-day custody to the agency.
Earlier on July 8, the CBI had registered an FIR against former Mumbai Police Commissioner Sanjay Pandey and Ramakrishna in the illegal phone tapping case. The investigation agency had alleged that iSec Securities Pvt. Ltd, one firm amongst a few others that conducted a security audit of NSE had illegally tapped phones of NSE employees during 2009-17.
Chitra Ramakrishna’s arrest comes a month after the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) found 18 entities guilty of collusion in the 2015 dark-fibre case. Some of these entities were related to Ramakrishna and former NSE COO Anand Subramanian. Consequently, it imposed a penalty of Rs 7 crore on NSE and Rs 5 crore each on Ramkrishna and Ravi Narain, who was also the former NSE chief.
Besides, a fine of Rs 5 crore had been levied on Subramanian Anand. Further, Sebi had slapped a fine of Rs 6 crore on Way2Wealth Brokers, Rs 5 crore on GKN Securities and Rs 3 crore on Sampark Infotainment. They had been asked to pay the total amount of penalty within 45 days, according to a Sebi order passed earlier last month.
Ramakrishna was in March arrested for the NSE co-location scam case by the CBI. The case pertains to the allegations that certain brokers received unfair preferential access to NSE servers. Stock prices on the trading screen keep changing every microsecond.
On February 25, the CBI had arrested former NSE group operating officer Anand Subramanian after expanding its probe into the co-location scam in the exchange following “fresh facts” in the Sebi report that referred to a mysterious yogi guiding the actions of Ramkrishna. The Securities and Exchange Board of India on February 11 had charged Ramkrishna and others with alleged governance lapses in the appointment of Subramanian as the chief strategic advisor and his re-designation as group operating officer and advisor to MD.
(With agency inputs)
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