The CBI has registered a case against a private company in New Delhi, founded by former Mumbai Police Commissioner Sanjay Pandey, its then directors and other officials and four officials of the National Stock Exchange (NSE), Mumbai, on a reference from the ministry of home affairs (MHA).
This is in connection with the alleged illegal interception of the phone calls of NSE employees carried out by its top management in collusion with the said private company between 2009-2017, agency officers said on Friday.
It is also alleged that the transcripts of these calls were provided by the said private company and received by senior officials of the NSE. An amount of approximately Rs 4.45 crore was allegedly paid to the said private company for this activity, the agency has claimed.
Efforts were made to elicit Pandey’s response through messages and calls, but his phone remained switched off.
Those named in the CBI’s FIR are M/s iSEC Services Pvt. Ltd, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, and its then officials, including the then directors Santosh Pandey, Anand Narayan, Armaan Pandey and Manish Mittal, the then senior information security analyst Naman Chaturvedi and others, including Sanjay Pandey and Arun Kumar Singh, along with Ravi Narain, the then MD; Chitra Ramakrishna, the then DMD; Ravi Varanasi, the then executive vice president; Mahesh Haldipur, the then head (premises), all of NSE and other unknown persons.
According to the CBI, it was alleged that from 2009 to 2017, Narain, Ramakrishna, Varanasi and Haldipur and the said private company conspired to illegally intercept the phones of NSE employees. In furtherance to this conspiracy, the said private company was allegedly engaged in the guise of conducting ‘Periodic Study of Cyber Vulnerabilities' at the NSE. It was further alleged that top officials of the NSE issued agreement/work orders in favour of the said private company and illegally intercepted the phone calls of its employees by installing machine/s, in contravention of the provisions of the Indian Telegraph Act.
‘‘No permission for this activity was taken from the Competent Authority as provided under section 5 of the Indian Telegraph Act. No consent of the employees of NSE was also taken in this matter. Searches were conducted on Friday at 18 premises of the accused, including at Mumbai, Pune, Kota, Lucknow and Delhi/NCR etc,’’ said a CBI officer.
On Tuesday, Pandey faced enquiry from the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in Delhi in a money-laundering case linked to the alleged NSE co-location scam. Pandey’s questioning by the ED was related to the functioning and activities of iSEC Securities Pvt. Ltd, one firm amongst others that conducted a security audit of the NSE around the time the co-location irregularities are alleged to have taken place.
Pandey, a 1986-batch Indian Police Service officer retired from service on June 30. Before his four-month stint as Mumbai’s commissioner of police beginning March 1, he served as acting Maharashtra director general of police.
