For former National Stock Exchange MD and CEO Chitra Ramkrishna, her ‘Himalayan spiritual consults’ yielded material benefits aplenty but, clearly, they have failed to yield sublime dividends and, now, it is time to pay the piper.
The income tax department has come knocking at the door, with searches being conducted on premises linked to Ramkrishna in Mumbai on Thursday, as part of a tax evasion investigation against her and others, official sources said.
“Based on some credible information related to tax evasion and financial irregularities, searches are being conducted at Mumbai and Chennai. The searches are still underway and it would not be possible to share details of the operation at this moment,” said a top I-T official. Ramkrishna is in the news after a recent order by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) said she had been guided by a yogi, dwelling in the Himalayan ranges, in the appointment of Anand Subramanian as the exchange’s group operating officer and adviser to the managing director (MD).
Apart from this, the order said, Ramkrishna had reportedly shared certain internal confidential information, including financial and business plans of NSE, dividend scenario and financial results, with the yogi and even consulted him over the performance appraisals of the exchange’s employees. Ramkrishna was the MD and CEO of NSE from April 2013 to December 2016.
The SEBI had charged Ramkrishna and others for alleged governance lapses in the appointment of Subramanian as the chief strategic adviser and his re-designation as group operating officer and adviser to MD. The market regulator had levied a fine of Rs 3 crore on Ramkrishna, Rs 2 crore each on the NSE, Subramanian, former NSE MD and CEO Ravi Narain, and Rs 6 lakh on V R Narasimhan, who was the chief regulatory officer and compliance officer.
“On February 15, the Congress raised the issue of a ‘Baba’ running the National Stock Exchange (NSE) and a complicit Modi GovernmentFinance Ministry-Ministry of Corporate Affairs-SFIO-FIU-CBI-ED remaining mum,” tweeted Congress general secretary and chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala.
The 190-page SEBI order had faulted Ramkrishna for running the exchange at the behest of a mysterious yogi, calling it ‘bizarre misconduct’ and a ‘glaring breach’ of regulations. Ramakrishna was the second-highest paid executive in the financial services industry in FY16, before she quit. She was appointed joint managing director of the NSE in 2009 and promoted to CEO in 2013. Her salary that year was second only to Aditya Puri’s. But in 2015, things started to unravel.
A Singapore based whistle-blower alleged that a Delhi-based member on the NSE was able to access privileged price information by linking to servers and getting access to the least crowded servers. This later came to be known as the co-location scam, where select traders were allegedly given preferential access to data and trading systems through the colocation facility at the exchange. Ramakrishna resigned from NSE in December 2016 for personal reasons.
