CBI arrests Sanjay Gupta of OPG Securities in NSE case

NEW DELHI: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Wednesday arrested Sanjay Gupta, managing director of Delhi-based stock broking firm, OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd, in its probe into the National Stock Exchange (NSE) co-location case; the bourse’s former chief executive officer (CEO) Chitra Ramkrishna is already in jail.

Gupta was named in the CBI’S FIR in the NSE case in 2018 itself but was arrested for the first time on Tuesday. The businessman allegedly misused the architecture of co-location—a facility offered by NSE where brokers could place their servers within the stock exchange premises giving them faster access to the markets—to gain an edge over others.

The CBI carried out raids at Gupta’s premises on Tuesday after which he was arrested.

A CBI official, requesting anonymity, said Gupta managed to get access to a Mumbai-based syndicate to allegedly influence officials of Securities and Exchange Board of India probing the NSE co-location case.

A second CBI official said the agency had information that Gupta was planning to destroy key evidence in the case because of which he was arrested.

Gupta is one of the main beneficiaries of the co-location facility started by NSE which helped him get favourable access to the market over other brokers, with a crucial time advantage.

The CBI probe has revealed that between 2010 and 2015, when Ramkrishna was managing NSE, OPG Securities connected to the secondary POP server of NSE on 670 trading days in the Futures & Options segment. OPG and several other brokers had access to the server architecture (tick-by-tick) of NSE between 2010 and 2015, enabling them to log-in first to the server and get the data split-second faster, getting “an unfair advantage”. Besides, the brokers were allegedly permitted to connect to the backup servers with very little load and were given far better access to the market feed.