Sebi Imposes Penalty On NSE, Chitra Ramakrishna, 16 Others In Co-location Scam

Sebi imposed a cumulative penalty of Rs 43.8 crore on the 18 entities, with the NSE alone slapped a Rs 7-crore fine, while Rs 5 crore on Chitra Ramakrishna, Rs 5 crore on Anand Subramanian

Markets regulator the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has imposed penalties on 18 entities, including the National Stock Exchange (NSE), Chitra Ramakrishna, Anand Subramanian, and others in connection with the NSE co-location case, according to news reports.

The capital market regulator imposed a cumulative penalty of Rs 43.8 crore on the 18 entities, with the NSE alone slapped a Rs 7-crore fine, while Rs 5 crore on Chitra Ramakrishna, Rs 5 crore on Anand Subramanian, and Rs 5 crore on Ravi Varanasi.

The board has also slapped a penalty of Rs 1 crore each on Nagendra Kumar SRVS, Deviprasad Singh, and MR Shashibhushan, Rs 1.10 crore on Prashanth D'souza, Om Prakash Gupta, Sonali Gupta, Rahul Gupta, Rs 3 crore on Sampark Infotainment Pvt. Ltd, Rs 5 crore on GKN Securities, and Rs 6 crore on Way2Wealth Brokers Private Ltd. Rs 10 lakh penalty has been imposed on Netaji Patil, Rima Srivastava, Parshant Mittal, Mohit Mutreja, according to news reports.

The Sebi has sent notices to the entities and asked them to pay the total amount of penalty within 45 days of the receipt of the order though demand draft or online.

The Sebi order stated, “Having regard to the factors listed in Section 15J of the SEBI Act and Section 23 J of the SCRA, it is now established that W2W and GKN, in collusion with the employees of NSE and Sampark made significant profit due to unfair latency advantage available with them.”

Chitra Ramkrishna, who is now in the CBI custody, had allegedly shared sensitive information about the exchange with a mystic yogi who lives in the Himalayas. Earlier, the CBI had in a statement mentioned that the alleged unfair practices occurred between 2010 and 2015.

The Sebi in its earlier order said that it came across certain documentary evidence that showed that Ramkrishna had shared internal information including organisational structure, dividend scenario, financial results, human resources policy, and related issues, response to regulator, etc of NSE with an ‘unknown person’ through emails in the period from 2014 to 2016.

The regulator had charged her and others with alleged governance lapses in the appointment of Subramanian as the chief strategic advisor and his re-designation as group operating officer and adviser to the MD.