Former NSE CEO Chitra Ramkrishna arrested by CBI in co-location scam case

New Delhi, Mar 07: Chitra Ramkrishna, former CEO and MD of India’s largest stock exchange, National Stock Exchange (NSE), was arrested by the CBI today for her alleged role in the co-location scam at the exchange.

 

 

This is the first big arrest CBI has made in four years after it filed a first information report (FIR) in 2018.

 

The CBI had recently issued a lookout circular against Chitra Rama Krishna, Ravi Narayan, and Anand Subernium so that they could not leave the country. The CBI is probing the alleged improper dissemination of information from the computer servers of the market exchanges to the stockbrokers. Ramakrishna and another former CEO Ravi Narayan as well as two other officials have been penalised by the SEBI for lapses in recruitment at the senior level.

 

 

 

Ramkrishna was appointed the MD and CEO of NSE on the basis of a strong recommendation made by Ravi Narain, NSE’s longest the longest-serving boss and Ramkrishna’s predecessor. Now, both Narain and Ramkrishna are under the CBI scanner. Ramkrishna was a chartered accountant who joined the exchange from IDBI, while Narain is a graduate of the Wharton Business School.

 

 

The NSE co-location scam has many facets. It involves data theft, and is likely to bring the actions of almost the entire senior management of the exchange in charge of key portfolios between 2009 and 2016 under scrutiny . NSE officially started co-location in January 2010 but it was sharing crucial data with professors at the Mumbai-based research institution Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) long before that. This too is being investigated by the CBI.

 

CBI’s investigation centres around the faulty trading infrastructure at NSE that gave preferential treatment to a clutch of brokers.

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