NSE scandal: Ex-MD Chitra Ramkrishna sent to judicial custody till March 28

Earlier, her lawyers had requested the court to provide her home-cooked food, a prayer book, and some face masks. The court has allowed Ramakrishna to carry her medicines, spectacles and a prayer book.

The judge said, “There are inmates who are in their 70s, who eat Tihar jail food. I have myself eaten Tihar jail food. It is good. There will be no special facility to anyone. VIP prisoners want everything and the rules to be changed. Every accused, every prisoner is the same. She is not a VIP.”

The CBI had moved an application seeking her judicial custody.

The court said that the investigating agency had sought 14-day judicial custody for Ramkrishna earlier and now did not want to seek further custody. “Is she the mastermind of this FIR or there was a puppet master pulling the strings?” the court asked.

The CBI submitted that it would be “premature to say that at this stage.”  Ramakrishna’s lawyers have also informed the court that they are filing a bail application.

On March 8, the court had pulled up the CBI for its “slow pace of investigation” in the case, saying that the reputation of the country was at stake and that people will stop investing in India and move to China.

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 NSE, early login and “dark fibre”, which can allow a trader split-second faster access to the data feed of the exchange. Even 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. According to CBI, between 2010 and 2014, Gupta abused the NSE server architecture, in criminal conspiracy with unknown officials of NSE, and even bribed SEBI officials.