A Delhi court extended the judicial custody of Chitra Ramkrishna, former managing director and chief executive of the National Stock Exchange (NSE), on Monday in the case of alleged stock market manipulation. Special Judge Sanjeev Aggarwal extended Ramkrishna’s judicial custody till April 11. The court will then hear her bail application, to which the CBI has been asked to respond by April 8.
Ramkrishna was arrested by the CBI today for her alleged role in the co-location scam at exchange. This is the first big arrest CBI has made in four years after it filed a first information report (FIR) in 2018.
The NSE co-location scam has many facets. It involves data theft, and is likely to bring the actions of almost the entire senior management of the exchange in charge of key portfolios between 2009 and 2016 under scrutiny . NSE officially started co-location in January 2010 but it was sharing crucial data with professors at the Mumbai-based research institution Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) long before that. This too is being investigated by the CBI.
CBI’s investigation centres around the faulty trading infrastructure at NSE that gave preferential treatment to a clutch of brokers.