New Delhi: The CBI has arrested Delhi-based broker and managing director of OPG Securities Sanjay Gupta in the NSE scam, four years after the agency registered an FIR against him for alleged preferential access of the market through multiple IDs and secondary servers called co-location facility, officials said on Wednesday.
The agency on late Tuesday evening carried out searches and arrested Gupta from his office here, they said The CBI had earlier arrested former NSE CEO and MD Chitra Ramkrishna and Group Operating Officer Anand Subramanian in connection with the case and both are in judicial custody since March.
Officials said Gupta has managed to get access to a Mumbai-based syndicate to allegedly influence SEBI officials probing the NSE co-location scam. They said the syndicate members had assured Gupta of managing SEBI officials on his behalf, they said. The agency also had information that Gupta had attempted to destroy some key evidence in the case which necessitated his arrest after four years, they said.
Also read: NSE co-location scam: CBI launches search operation in multiple cities
The CBI has alleged that Gupta was one of the main beneficiary of the co-location facility started by the NSE which helped him get favourable access to the market over other brokers through multiple logins and access to secondary servers giving him crucial time advantage and resulting in a multi-fold increase in profits of his company in just two years.
In the NSE, co-location scam selected players had market price information before others as the stock market was using Tick-by-Tick technology in algorithm based trading and co-location services of which Gupta was a beneficiary. The facility allowed the users to get access to the prices ahead of others, they said.
The probe has so far established that during the period 2010-15 when Ramkrishna was managing the affairs of NSE, OPG Securities, one of the accused in the FIR, had connected to the secondary POP server on 670 trading days in the Futures and Options segment, the CBI has alleged.
The officials said investigation is going on in the alleged role of the then senior NSE officials who were looking into the co-location which is understood to have given "unfair advantage and wrongful gain" to certain stock brokers including OPG Securities, an accused in the case, at the cost of others.
The officials said co-location facility in NSE was a "major policy decision" in which the then MD and CEO and other senior officials would have played a "decisive role". The CBI probe has shown that Ramkrishna was appointed as Joint MD in 2009 and remained in the position till March 31, 2013, with the power of DMD. She got elevated as MD and CEO on April 1, 2013.
The agency has also alleged that Muralidharan Natarajan, the CTO of NSETECH (a subsidiary of NSE), who was responsible for setting up co-location architecture at the NSE was directly reporting to Ramkrishna, officials said. Ramkrishna, who succeeded former CEO Ravi Narain in 2013, had appointed Subramanian as her advisor who was later elevated as group operating officer (GOO) and was receiving a fat pay cheque of Rs 4.21 crore annually.
On February 25, the CBI had arrested former NSE group operating officer Anand Subramanian and later Ramkrishna was also taken into custody. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) 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 the MD. (PTI)
