CBI questions former MD-CEO Ramkrishna in NSE co-location case

In an order last week, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) penalised Ramkrishna and a few others for allegedly violating securities contract rules in the appointment of Subramanian as group operating officer and advisor to the MD. It said Ramkrishna was steered by a ‘yogi’ in the appointment of Subramanian.

On Thursday, the Income Tax Department searched the residences of Ramkrishna and Subramanian as part of its probe into allegations of illegal gains made by passing on internal exchange information to a third party.

The 2018 case pertains to charges of preferential access to the trading system to some brokers, through the co-location facility (where brokers can buy ‘rack space’ for their servers) at the stock exchange, early login and ‘dark fibre’, which can allow trader split-second faster access to the data feed of the bourse. Such a split-second edge is considered capable of bringing huge gains to a trader.

The CBI had booked Sanjay Gupta, owner and promoter of Delhi-based OPG Securities Pvt Ltd, and others in the case. As per the CBI, between 2010 and 2014, Gupta abused the NSE server architecture, in criminal conspiracy with unknown officials of NSE, and even bribed Sebi officials.

“Gupta, with the help of his brother-in-law Aman Kokrady and other unknown persons, managed the data centre staff of NSE, who passed the information regarding switching on time of NSE exchange servers. Further, unknown officials of NSE gave OPG Securities Pvt Ltd access to servers which were technologically latest and least crowded at that particular period. This helped OPG Securities Pvt Ltd. in being mostly the first one to login on the exchange server of the NSE,” the FIR by CBI said.

The allegations of unfair access were first made by a whistleblower in January 2015. The whistleblower wrote to Sebi, alleging that a few brokers were able to log into the NSE system with better hardware specifications while engaging in algorithmic trading, to their unfair advantage. Algorithmic trading, or ‘algo’ in market parlance, refers to orders generated at superfast speed by the use of advanced mathematical models that involve automated execution of trade.

A technical advisory committee report by the Sebi later found that OPG Securities had consistently logged in first on selected TBT (tick-by-tick) servers on most trading days in 2010-2014, and also had access to servers that had better hardware. At this point, Gupta is alleged to have bribed Sebi officials for a favourable order in its enquiry. Ramkrishna was MD-CEO of NSE from April 2013 to December 2016, while Narain held the same post from April 1994 to March 2013.