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Phones of NSE employees tapped since 1997: ED seeks five-day custody of former MD Chitra Ramkrishna
In what hints at a larger conspiracy to control the activities of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) by its former managing director Chitra Ramkrishna, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has learnt during interrogation of three persons that phone-tapping of bourse’s employees was going on since 1997
New Delhi: In what hints at a larger conspiracy to control the activities of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) by its former managing director Chitra Ramkrishna, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has learnt during interrogation of three persons that phone-tapping of bourse’s employees was going on since 1997.
Documentary evidence in this regard has already been collected and it will now be confronted with Ramkrishna, the federal anti-money laundering probe agency said on Monday.
“Ramkrishna was confronted with three persons and their statements have also been recorded and the interrogation has revealed that phone tapping/snooping of calls of NSE employees was going (on) since 1997 and pursuant thereto, documentary evidence pertaining to said period was collected and same is now required to be confronted to Ramkrishna,” ED said in a Delhi court while seeking Ramkrishna’s further five days’ custody. She was taken into custody by ED on Thursday.
The agency did not name the “three persons” confronted with Ramkrishna.
The revelation widens the ambit of probe as it was earlier found that NSE employees’ phones were tapped between 2009 and 2017 using iSEC Services, a company founded by former Mumbai police commissioner Sanjay Pandey, an officer said requesting anonymity.
Ramkrishna has been associated with the NSE in different roles since its formation in early 1990s.
ED and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) are investigating her role in multiple irregularities, including misuse of co-location facility by some stockbrokers, appointment of a close aide – Anand Subramanian at an important position in the exchange and the phone tapping.
Ramkrishna was arrested on March 6.
ED claimed on Monday that it needed to confront the former MD “with some more persons involved or suspected to be involved in the tapping as well as to confront her with some newly collected evidence of tapping to determine her role as well as role of other persons who facilitated the offence of money laundering”.
The court remanded Ramkrishna to ED custody for four days.
As reported by HT last week, ED came to know about illegal phone tapping at the NSE while probing the co-location scam.
The agency had stumbled upon the “monitoring reports for call logs” and “approval notes” of the bourse having its former managing director Chitra Ramkrishna’s approval, which revealed the conspiracy for illegal tapping of landline phones of NSE employees for years.
CBI has been probing the NSE co-location fraud case since 2018, while ED is probing money laundering angle in it since 2019. Several stock-broking companies allegedly got preferential access to the NSE’s server when Ramkrishna was the MD-CEO of the bourse between 2010 and 2015.
