ED stumbled upon phone tap logs during NSE scam probe
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) while investigating National Stock Exchange (NSE) co-location scam 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 through former Mumbai police commissioner Sanjay Pandey’s family firm.
The central agency made this claim while seeking Ramkrishna’s custody from a Delhi court on Thursday as it filed a money laundering case against Ramkrishna, Pandey and NSE’s former MD Ravi Narain.
The CBI has been probing the NSE co-location fraud case since 2018, while the ED is probing money laundering in it since 2019. Several stock-broking com
Chitra Ramkrishna
panies allegedly got preferential access to the NSE’s server when Ramkrishna was the MD-CEO of the bourse between 2010 and 2015. The CBI arrested Ramkrishna on March 6. Former NSE group operating officer Anand Subramanian was also arrested in February.
After it stumbled upon the phone tapping in the co-location probe, the ED recently sent a report to the ministry of home affairs (MHA), which in turn asked the CBI to file a case last week, according to an officer.
The CBI last week raided premises linked to Pandey, iSEC Services Pvt Ltd, and others in the phone tapping case, in which provisions of the Indian Telegraph Act, Information Technology Act, Indian Wireless Telegraphy Act, criminal conspiracy, cheating and prevention of corruption act have been invoked.
“ED recorded statements of various persons including Chitra Ramkrishna and had collected various documents including the ‘Monitoring Reports for Call Logs’, ‘approval notes ‘of NSE bearing approval granted by Ramkrishna for the so-called Periodic Study of Cyber Vulnerabilities etc,” the agency said in court on Thursday.
Pandey’s firm was paid ₹4.5 crore for the tapping, which, the ED says, was decided by Ramkrishna and other officers of the NSE.
The court granted four days’ custody of Ramkrishna to the ED, which will probe a larger conspiracy and money trail in the tapping.