The visit of former NSE CEO Chitra Ramakrishna and Group Operating Officer Anand Subramaniam to tax havens Seychelles has come under the scanner of the CBI, officials said on Friday, as the agency continues its probe against them in the co-location scam.
He said the agency believes it was not a spontaneous holiday trip and needs a thorough investigation.
The CBI has also told the special court that the visit of Ramakrishna and Subramaniam to Seychelles is being probed.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on February 11 had accused Ramakrishna and others of alleged governance lapses in the appointment of Subramaniam as chief strategic advisor and his re-designation as group operating officer and advisor to the MD.
SEBI in its report also mentions an email conversation of Ramakrishna with a “mysterious yogi”, suspected to be Subramaniam, which mentions a visit to Seychelles.
“Unknown person wrote to Ramakrishna on February 17, 2015, Keep bags ready, I plan to travel to Seychelles next month, will try if you can come with me…”.
Meanwhile, the agency is focusing on retrieving the email exchanges between Ramakrishna and rigyajursama@outlook.com, he said.
In his statement to SEBI, Ramakrishna had said that the unidentified person with email id rigyajursama@outlook.com was a ‘siddha-purush’ or ‘paramhansa’ who had no physical personality and could materialize at will.
The CBI probe is understood to have indicated that Subramaniam had created an email ID to communicate with Ramakrishna as a Yogi.
He said that most of these email exchanges were destroyed and the computer systems used to send these emails were shut down after Ramakrishna’s exit in 2016.
He said the CBI may contact service provider Microsoft to know whether these email exchanges can be retrieved to get a clearer picture.
Officials said the CBI, which had been probing the co-location scam against a Delhi-based stock broker since 2018, swung into action after a Sebi report showed alleged abuse of power by the then top NSE officials. I.
Officials said investigations are underway into the alleged role of then senior NSE officials, who were looking for co-location, which is understood to have given “undue profits and wrongful gains” to some stockbrokers, including OPG Securities. went. matter, at the expense of others.
Officials said facilitating co-location at NSE was a “major policy decision” in which the then MD and CEO and other senior officials would have played a “decisive role”.
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CBI investigation revealed that Ramakrishna was appointed as Joint MD in 2009 and remained in the post till 31 March 2013 with the power of DMD.
Ramakrishna was promoted to MD & CEO on April 1, 2013 and left the exchange in 2016.
The co-location was initiated by NSE during this period, the CBI has alleged.
In the co-location facility provided by NSE, brokers can place their servers within the stock exchange premises to give them faster access to the markets. It has been alleged that some brokers with the connivance of insiders made windfall profits by misusing algorithms and co-location facility.
The CBI has also found that Muraleedharan Natarajan, CTO of NSETech (a subsidiary of NSE), which was responsible for setting up the co-location architecture at NSE, was reporting directly to Ramakrishna, officials said.
On February 25, the former was arrested by the CBI after expanding the probe into the co-location scam in the exchange to Subramaniam following “fresh facts” in a SEBI report that referred to a mysterious yogi guiding Ramakrishna’s actions. went.
Subramaniam was reportedly referred to as a “yogi” in the forensic audit, but Sebi in its final report had dismissed the claim.
Ramakrishna, who replaced former CEO Ravi Narayan in 2013, had appointed Subramaniam as his advisor, who was later promoted as Group Operations Officer (GOO) on a hefty pay check of Rs 4.21 crore annually.
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